

Jaz drives, spiral notebooks, and SCSI: how we lose scientific data - abraham
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/11/preserving-science-how-data-gets-lost.ars

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zandorg
I used to backup all my stuff onto CD-R's, then DVD-R's. Now I get a 1TB drive
and copy it to 4 other 1TB drives in various places. I also have an
organisation system which declares EG OthersAlbums, or MyDocuments.
Others[ETC] contains stuff I didn't create, My[ETC] is stuff I created myself.

I also have 2 16GB flash drives with just about everything I've created.

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billswift
>retrieving that sort of material may simply be impossible.

Bull, it may be difficult and expensive, but calling it impossible is just
excuse-making; if it is _not worth it_ to recover the data is really a
different matter than whether it is possible. When the data has actually been
lost, _then_ it's impossible.

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chadgeidel
Forgive me if this is ignorant. Referring to publicly funded projects only
here - why isn't this data / source code / whatever published as part of the
research paper, and archived by someone like the Library of Congress?

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zaphar
I get it. Its hard. Its not simple. You still have to do it. unit testing and
integration tests are hard in my line of work. They take time I could be
spending creating stuff. They are an annoying interruption in my day. I still
have to do them though. And after a while they pay off when the code gets
bigger. Doing the work to share the data will pay off too, but first you have
to do the sharing.

