3rd Year Workshop

Backing up your work and data

Ian McCarthy, Emory University

Economics PhD Professionalism Workshop

Backing up

How do you back up your work? Lots of ways:

  1. External hard drives

  2. Cloud services

  3. Automatic back up services

External hard drives

Pros:

  • Affordable and fully in your control
  • Data remain private

Cons:

  • Only backed up at certain intervals
  • Can be slow
  • Data are all in the same physical place

Crashes will inevitably happen between backups

Cloud services

Lots of cloud services like DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive

Pros:

  • Works really well and painlessly
  • Easy to share when needed

Cons:

  • Can get expensive over time
  • Can’t backup private or restricted data

Offsite hard drives

Just build your own network!

Pros:

  • Data stays with you
  • Backup in real-time
  • Redundancies built-in to network configuration

Cons:

  • Expensive to buy
  • Harder to setup

My backup system

  • Synology 4-bay NAS DiskStation
  • “Synology Drive” to sync files across locations
  • Synology Hybrid RAID (because I’m not a network engineer)
  • Sync with Google Drive for some individual files or folders (bibtex library)

My attempted system

  • Cloud-based system with AWS
  • PostgreSQL on attached cloud drive
  • Elastic IP
  • Access from anywhere on almost any device