In order to avoid data losses, it is important to keep in mind some good practices for data storage:
Where ?
Important data should be kept in secure location. Avoid to store your data on your laptop, or on commercial external solution (Dropbox, Google Drive). They may be read by others and you could lost data property.
What we advise you to do is to keep 3 copies of important data, and at least two of them outside your laptop. if you store data on your laptop, make sure they are properly backed up regularly.
In order to avoid data losses, it is important to keep in mind some good practices for data storage:
Please, follow your university guidelines of storage (LINK), this is the best solution to guarantee RGPD, ethical requirement, and intellectual property. Solutions will depend on the size of your data and whether you want to share these datasets with your research partners.
Insert:[ULB]; [UCLouvain]; [UNamur]; [ULiège]; [USLB]; [UMons]
Your organization may not have a secure storage solution, which is why the European Commission, via its EOSC portal, has developed a search engine for secure cloud solution for research data, available here
How?
If several versions of a datasets are produced, it is best to follow a file naming convention. Insert: page 9.
Not all of these versions have to be store in 3 copies, but keep at least the raw data, the cured one, and the versions used for publications.
At the end of the project, store your data on a repository, where you can archive it for long term preservation
Sensitive data are particularly important to store securely. For more information on sensitive data, please look at our web pages related to RGPD.
If you want to document your storage solution, please refer to this document