
Diehard Coders Just Rescued NASA’s Earth Science Data - sprucely
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/diehard-coders-just-saved-nasas-earth-science-data/
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anonymous_iam
Which data was rescued? Was it the original raw data, or the "corrected" data?

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gus_massa
I hope they saved both.

It's very important to make a copy the original raw data and all the metadata
to know how/when/where/under what condition/by whom/ ... take the raw data.
Just in case it's necessary to analyze it again, verify the correction code,
use better interpolation techniques, or whatever new analysis is deem
necessary in the future.

And also it important to make a copy the processed data because it's necessary
a lot of time and knowledge to process them correctly and sometimes it's
enough to get the processed data make further analysis.

[For a totally no controversial topic, if someone decides to make a backup of
the LHC data used to discover the Higgs boson, I hope that they also save both
version of the data.]

Anyway, the title is misleading. They didn't rescue anything. The data were
never lost or at an imminent risk. They are still in the original source. They
only made a backup in case someone decides to erase them. (Can we classify
this as a fake new?)

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hololight
They mention that they already have come across sources that had been emptied
of all the data... So No... This is not a just in case; there seems to be a
concerted effort to destroy data that proves inconvenient things...

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gus_massa
From the article:

> _They can’t be sure when this data disappeared (or if anyone backed it up
> first)._

It probably means that is was deleted a few years ago, not during the last 25
days. Perhaps it was some internal reorganization and the data is hopefully
available in other URL. Perhaps it was a disk failure and a bad backup.
Perhaps the main researcher got a better job at an university and moved the
whole group and the links/server just rotted. Perhaps some moron sysadmin
decided to save a little of disk space. It looks ridiculous, but
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes)

There is no evidence of a concerted effort.

\--

To get an idea of the problem, imagine that in 10 years someone decides to
make a backup of all the ancient open source projects. And they are horrified
to discover that 20% of the links go to SourceForge and there is a 5% of links
with apparent relevant information to ExpertsExchange! After some time you get
link rote, without an evil external force.

That's why I think it's important to make an organized effort to keep
information alive, like the work of
[https://archive.org/](https://archive.org/) . I just don't agree to use a
normal sloppy human behavior to support political activism.

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jpadro
What a load, if you access a system without authorization it is still
considered a hack, especially when you move data off that site. Punishable
under federal law.

