Ten Simple Rules for Digital Data Storage

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new paper whose author list includes several members of our community:

Edmund M. Hart, Pauline Barmby, David LeBauer, François Michonneau, Sarah Mount, Patrick Mulrooney, Timothée Poisot, Kara H. Woo, Naupaka B. Zimmerman, and Jeffrey W. Hollister: “Ten Simple Rules for Digital Data Storage”. PLOS Computational Biology, Oct 20, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005097.

Their ten rules are:

1. Anticipate How Your Data Will Be Used
2. Know Your Use Case
3. Keep Raw Data Raw
4. Store Data in Open Formats
5. Data Should Be Structured for Analysis
6. Data Should Be Uniquely Identifiable
7. Link Relevant Metadata
8. Adopt the Proper Privacy Protocols
9. Have a Systematic Backup Scheme
10. The Location and Method of Data Storage Depend on How Much Data You Have

We hope you find it useful, and encourage you to follow in their footsteps and write down what you know so that others can learn from your experience. As always, we are smarter together.