According to the HKU Policy on Research Data and Records Management, research data are required to be “retained with the University for as long as they are of continuing value to the researcher and the wider research community, and as long as specified by research funder, patent law, legislative and other regulatory requirements. The minimum retention period for research data and records is five years after data collection or the most recent publication related to the data, whichever is later.”
In clause 5 of the policy, it also states that research data and records should be handled safely and stored securely at more than one location.
Keeping your research data safe and secure is crucial, especially for personal, sensitive and confidential data. Adopting good storage and back-up strategies could help prevent data loss or data leakage. When looking for locations for storing your research data, researchers should also pay attention to data security, including but not limited to physical security, network security, plus the security of computer systems and files to prevent unauthorized access or unwanted changes to data, disclosure or the destruction of data.
Password protection, encryption, and regular back-ups are measures that could be taken to safely storing, sending files, and protecting the files against accidental or malicious data loss, particularly when devices such as personal laptops, smartphones, USB drives, computer tablets are used for storing your valuable research data. Those devices are considered risky for data loss or being stolen.
More resources on data safety and security are available on HKU ITS website:
The University’s Information Security and Data Management Policy
The HKU Data Protection Office, Data Protection Awareness Training (Research Data)
The UK Data Service also provides a guide on data security.
Common storage media for active research data are:
Internal Hard Disk Drives (e.g. computer, laptop)
Removable Storage Media (e.g. External Hard Disk Drives, USB flash drives, CD/DVD/Blue-ray discs)
Cloud storage
Physical locations (for non-digital data, e.g. paper-based records, specimen, physical media)
The University’s Network Drive or Server / ITS Cloud
Researchers are suggested to follow the 3-2-1 rule for data storage:
Keep 3 copies of your important data (one primary and two backups)
Keep backups on 2 different media (e.g. secure local server, external hard disk, secure cloud storage, etc.)
Keep at least 1 copy off-site (e.g. outside of your home or workplace)
You may check out more details on the rule and the pros and cons of different storage media for digital data authored by Ruggiero and Heckathorn for the US-CERT in 2012.
The UK Data Service also provides a guide on data storage.
Reference:
Paul Ruggiero and Matthew A. Heckathorn (2012). Data Backup Options, Carnegie Mellon University. Produced for US-CERT, a government organisation. https://www.cisa.gov/uscert/sites/default/files/publications/data_backup_options.pdf
It is too late to think of backup after your research data has been lost or rendered unusable. Costs and time needed for proper backup are likely to be small in comparison to re-creating research data again from scratch.
Backups are copies of files stored for short or near-term and it is often performed automatically on a fixed schedule, aiming to prevent data loss when the current version or primary copy got damaged or gone missing.
More resources:
UK Data Service, Guide on Backup
OpenAIRE, Guides for Researchers: Raw data, backup and versioning