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> I’ve seen individual researchers ruined due to USB drive shenanigans Could you elaborate?

• activiation 3y ago
  Maybe someone unsafely unplugged the drive and corrupted it?
  • tivert 3y ago
    Or was just running around one filled with important irreplaceable data but no backups. I'm sure some IT person is tut-tutting getting ready chide the hypothetical researcher for not following the 3-2-1 rule, or something, but science researchers aren't IT people and they can be expected to not follow IT best practices.
    • greazy 3y ago
      This is it without a doubt. The number of times I've told lab mates to back up there data... Only to discover it's on random usb drives.
• op00to 3y ago
  I ran an overhead-funded data storage archive including multiple identical NAS on different campuses and a super fancy offsite tape archive. The researchers would rather buy a USB drive than do the paperwork to get more space because they had to explain why they needed more space. It was just paperwork, and not even mine. It served to justify our own grant requests so they didn’t have to include data storage as part of their grant. Anyway, their life’s research is on a set of these drives, with plenty of duplication to avoid the disk failure gnome. One day, all the drives disappeared. Tuns out the researcher normally left the drives on a desk, unsecured, in a ground floor office on an urban college campus. No cameras could see the office, so it could have been anyone. It’s literally a miracle that stuff didn’t walk 24/7.