This is a story I used to tell while teaching fieldworkers and other researchers about how to manage their data. It’s a moderately improbable story, but it happened to me and others have benefited from my misadventures. I haven’t had reason to tell it much lately, and I thought it might be useful to put into writing. This is a story from before cloud storage was common - back when you could, and often would, run out of online email storage space.

Content note: this story includes some unpleasant things that happened to me, including multiple stories of theft (cf. moderately improbable). Also, because it’s stressful for most of the story, I want to reassure you that it does have a happy conclusion. It explains a lot of my enthusiasm for good research data management.

In Australia, ‘honours’ is an optional fourth year for a three year degree. It’s a chance to do some more advanced coursework and try your hand at research, with a small thesis project. Of course, it doesn’t feel small when it’s the first time you’ve done a project that takes a whole year and is five times bigger than anything you’ve ever written.

I’ve written briefly about my honours story (here, and here in a longer post about my late honours supervisor Barb Kelly) . While I did finish my project, it all ended a bit weirdly when my supervisor Barb got ill and left during the analysis/writing crunch. The year after finishing honours I got an office job. I hoped to maybe do something more with my honours work, but I wasn’t sure what, and figured I would wait until Barb was better.

During that year, my sharehouse flat was broken into and the thief walked out with the laptop I’d used to do my honours project. The computer had all my university files on it, including my data and the Word version of my thesis. I lost interview video files, transcriptions, drafts, notes and everything except the PDF version I had uploaded to the University’s online portal. Uploading was optional at the time, if I didn’t do that I probably would have just been left with a single printed copy. I also lost all my jewellery and my brother’s base guitar, but I was most sad about the data (sorry bro).

Thankfully, I made a backup of my data and files on a USB drive that I kept in my handbag. This was back when a 4GB thumb drive was an investment.

That Friday, feeling sorry for myself after losing so many things I couldn’t replace, I decided to go dancing to cheer myself up. While out with a group of friends, my bag was stolen. It was the first time I had a nice handbag, and I still miss it.

Thankfully, I knew to make more than one back up. I had an older USB that I’d tucked down the back of the books on my shelf (a vintage 256MB drive my dad kindly got for me in undergrad after a very bad week when I lost an essay to a corrupted floppy disk).

When I went to retrieve the files, the drive was (also) corrupted. This happens with hard drives sometimes. My three different copies in three different locations were now lost to me.

Thankfully, my computer had a CD/DVD burner. This was a very cool feature in the mid-tens, and I used to make a lot of mixed CDs for my friends. During my honours project I had burned backed up files on some discs and left them at my parents house.

It was this third backup, kept off site, which became the only copy of my project. I very quickly made more copies.

When Barb was back at work, and I rejoined her as a PhD student, it meant we could return to the data and all my notes. The thesis went through a complete rewrite and many years later was published as a journal article (Gawne & Kelly 2014). It would have probably never happened if I didn’t have those project files. I continued with the same cautious approach to my research data ever since, including sending home SD cards while on field trips, making use of online storage, and archiving data with institutional repositories while a project is ongoing.

I’m glad that I made enough copies that I learnt a good lesson from a terrible series of events. Hopefully this will prompt you, too, to think about how many copies you have, where they’re located, and what would happen if you lost access to your online storage.