[RNLD] data recovery options

[James Crippen]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 12:50 AM, Peter Austin <pa2 at soas.ac.uk> wrote:
> As I tell my students, you WILL lose data at some point in your work -- it's
> a question of managing (and minimising) how much you lose.

Although paper documents are less likely to evaporate than digital
ones, you can just as easily lose them! This is obvious to people who
started in the typewriter era, but less so to the mostly digital crew
today. I lost my first field notebook and had never scanned it nor
finished copying from it, so there are things in there that are lost
forever. Bigger notebooks are more clumsy and hard to carry, but
they’re also less easy to lose. Black notebooks are more discreet, but
if you’re forgetful a bright red notebook is harder to misplace.

I encourage people like me who produce a lot of paper notes to do two
things: type them up and scan them. Deposit the scanned images with
your favourite archive. Typing up the notes, whether as an ordinary
document or in a database, forces you to revisit each note and gives
you the opportunity to gloss it and ponder it. It also incorporates
the data into your regular digital backup schedule.

Most important of all: Make some paper notes on how to get to your
digital stuff! In the event that you’re hit by a bus or something
equally deadly, it’s likely nobody will know how to find all your
data, and even more likely that nobody will know what to do with your
data. Every linguist doing fieldwork has a responsibility to the field
and to their consultants to leave behind information on how to handle
their remaining unarchived materials. Basically, you should write up
an ‘academic will’ that describes how to find your research (online
passwords, locations of backup drives, descriptions of notebooks,
etc.) and what to do with it. Leave it with a colleague, or with a
family member or close friend. If you sign it with a witness present
then it becomes legally equivalent to a will in most jurisdictions,
and thus the instructions have legally binding obligations for whoever
will manage your estate. This is a morbid topic that most linguists
don’t like thinking about, but it’s an inevitably necessary one.

Cheers,
James