1. Storage: Give your Data a Good Home
Erin Jerome, Open Access & Institutional Repository Librarian

2. Why should I care about storage?
Where and how you choose to store your research materials determines how long they’ll survive.
Planning, choosing, and documenting where you store these digital materials now ensures that you and others will have continued access to them in the future.
Risks: Theft, file corruption, viruses, environmental disasters, storage device malfunctions, accidental/malicious deletions.
Tell New Years hard drive crash horror story

3. LOCKSS: Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe!
Ideal - multiple copies stored in geographically dispersed locations
Options: Laptop/desktop, external hard drive (ideally dedicated to this purpose and stays in this location), flash drive/thumb drive (cheap, easy to obtain, portable), and the cloud (Google Drive, Amazon S3, Dropbox, iCloud, Box, etc)

4. Methods and Techniques
Establish a formalized routine to create backups on a regular basis - daily, weekly, whatever works best for you.
Regularly scheduled backups ensure that you are capturing snapshots of your work as you progress
You might copy your files to a departmental or university based storage network, copy your files to an external hard drive, copy your files to a third party cloud solution

5. Backup process
Manual
Connect to your backup site and copy your current content to a dated folder
Tip #1 - create separate dated folders for each backup
Tip #2 - do not delete old backups!
Tip #3 - maintain at least bi-monthly backups

6. Backup process continued...
Automated
Apple Time Machine or Airport Time Capsule
Windows File History
Some external hard drives come with built-in or freely available and compatible backup programs of their own.
Apple Time Machine (FREE) requires an external storage solution (e.g. external hard drive or flash drive), will automatically make hourly backups for past 24 hours, daily for past month, weekly for all previous months, OLDEST backups are DELETED, can deselect automatic backups
Airport Time Capsule - wifi base station and easy to use backup device - connects to your mac automatically and wirelessly (2-3TB)
Windows File History - continuously protects your personal files stored in libraries, desktop, favorites, and contacts folders. Periodically scans the file system for changes and copies changed files to another location. Supersedes existing Windows Backup and Restore features of Windows 7. Requires you to set up a drive to which you’ll save files. Microsoft recommends an external hard drive or network location
WD includes WD Backup software on their My Passport external hard drive, but this seems to only work with PCs. Doesn’t matter so much with Apple’s Time Machine.

7. Security Maintain at least one local (non-cloud) copy of your files
Maintain at least three separate, complete copies
Maintain at least one copy in a different geographical location
Maintain a history of changes in at least one location
Document your regular practices
Security - ongoing protection of your data and its integrity, keep virus protection up to date, utilize encryption for sensitive data
History of changes - using a software package to automatically back up your content without deleting older copies
Document - text file that specifies how, when, and where you store and back up your stuff

8. Long-Term Preservation
Keep a spreadsheet-based inventory of your content (file names, sizes, locations, types)
Systematize your folder and file naming conventions (version control!)
Make sure your file names are followed by the correct file extension (.txt, .pdf, .xls, etc.)
Avoid special characters in your files names (\?.*?<>{}[]&$,;.!)
Save a copy of your files in non-proprietary formats
Consider creating and regularly checking “checksums” or digital signatures for your most important files
Digital preservation - series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary
Documenting formats you are managing helps you keep track of potential sustainability issues - anyone remember WordPerfect?
Non-proprietary formats - formats that don’t require a software license for you to render and use later (data as a .csv for example)
Preservation tools - the same as the first screen, plus back up software like

9. Preservation Tools Backup Software (must be purchased):
Time Capsule (Apple), Genie Timeline Home, StorageCraft ShadowProtect, Acronis True Image, iDrive, and SOS Online Back
Checksum management (free):
Hashdeep and Fixity
Genie Timeline Home - backup for Windows, $40
StorageCraft ShadowProtect - Windows, $$$
Hashdeep - open source command line application, includes a reporting structure; Hashdeep is a program for recursively computing hashes with multiple algorithms simultaneously. It can also perform matching operations like the md5deep family of programs, but in a more powerful way. Hashdeep can perform an audit of hashes against a set of known hashess. With traditional matching, programs report if an input file matched one in a set of knows or if the input file did not match. It's hard to get a complete sense of the state of the input files compared to the set of knowns. It's possible to have matched files, missing files, files that have moved in the set, and to find new files not in the set.
Fixity - software program to automate checksum monitoring; do a fixity demo

10. Fixity Demo Second scan after some changes First scan of directory
Show spreadsheets

11. Resources
PRONOM registry:
General information:
World Backup Day:
Apple Time Machine:
Windows File History:
Fixity: or
Hashdeep:
PRONOM - registry that tracks endangered and supported formats
World Backup Day - March 31!