Back up Your Data

At the Penn State Faculty Senate meeting of October 23, 2007, the Senate Committee on Computing and Information Systems presented a report on backing up electronic data. The committee worked on this report for a couple of years, designing it in the hope that it would prompt individual students, staff, and faculty to arrange for backup of their electronic data.

The full report is available in the Faculty Senate minutes for October 23, 2007.

The key issues:

* Develop a system that you use regularly for backup of your data.

* Don't rely on CD or DVD storage for backup -- these are not reliable in the long term.

* Consider whether you might use one or two external hard drives, one of which can be kept at another site for added safety. Portable external hard drives of 160GB, 250GB, 500GB, and even 1TB are small, efficient, reliable, and increasingly affordable.

* Develop a plan to migrate aging data to new media formats.

* Consider backing your data up to an online server. Your university may provide this service for you. There are also some commercial sites that provide the service.