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\nQuite a handful<\/strong> When the data start to wear you down<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\nWhen I was preparing for my sabbatical<\/a> in Germany, I did a rough calculation to work out how much hard-drive space I’d need to bring my data back home with me. It went something like this: <\/p>\n \n(384 spots\/chip) x (8 chips\/library) x (40 time points) x (2 fluorescent channels\/spot) x (3 Mb\/image) x (3 replicates) = 2,211,840 Mb or approximately 2.2 terabytes<\/strong><\/p>\n \nGiven the assumption that in addition to three perfect replicates, I’d also generate a number of suboptimal videos that I’d still like to keep, I reckoned that a couple of 2 Tb hard-drives ought to do it. When I went and asked one of the local university IT guys for some advice on reliable drive models, I got the classic half-weary, half-suspicious IT counter-question:<\/p>\n \n“Why do you need that much space?”<\/p>\n \nI explained to him that I was doing a high-throughput image screen, and I’d calculated exactly how much room I needed for the entire experiment.<\/p>\n \n“You can’t possibly need that much,” I was told sagely. “That’s more space than your entire institute is allocated on the backup server.”<\/p>\n \nWell, quite. When I saw this person on my return and told him about my successful results, a look of panic flashed over his face. “Well, you can’t back up your experiment here<\/em>,” he said, as if I’d just proposed infecting him with a virulent strain of ebola virus.<\/p>\n \nSo what’s a girl to do? The hard-drives are things of beauty: brushed steel, reassuringly solid, reputable brand name, almost silent (unlike their first-generation counterparts, which sounded as if they were about to ask Air Traffic Control for permission to taxi down the runway). But rumors abound of unexpected corruptions, inexplicable failures, soured sectors and rotten RAIDS. Will two copies be enough? And what about after publication? Do I save all the original tifs, or only the final avi video formats? Will any self-respecting journal want to lug around all this supplemental data for me in perpetuity?<\/p>\n \nAnswers to the usual place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Remember the days when at the end of a postdoctoral stint, you could copy all of your files \u2013 documents, spreadsheets, presentations, data images and email \u2013 onto a couple of 5\u00bc inch floppy diskettes and sashay out of the … Continue reading