Backing Up My Thesis
Since I started working on my thesis, I have consistently backed it up. I’ve heard or read horror stories about losing your research, and my imagination helped to convince me that I need to carefully back up mine.
My method is simple. All of my research and writing is digital except books, which don’t belong to me, and two paper articles which I could always get through interlibrary loan again. So every night when I’ve finished working, I make a ZIP file of my thesis files. (I leave out the PDF articles and dissertations so that the file isn’t too big, but those are available online.) That ZIP file is copied onto my external hard drive. Then I e-mail the ZIP file to a Gmail account dedicated just to academic matters. If my computer crashes, my thesis is still on my hard disk. If a fire or hurricane destroys my residence hall and with it my computer and hard drive, my thesis is still backed up by Google. The whole process takes less than three minutes a night.
In August 1970 an anti-war terrorist group set off a massive explosion that destroyed a research building on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. One researcher was killed, and many people lost their research. Writing my master’s thesis shortly thereafter, I was so concerned that I kept the typescript in my rooming house and a carbon copy in my library carrel. That’s all we could do back then.
October 20, 2007, 12:53 pm