Western PhD student Aswin Sureshkumar lost more than four years of pancreatic cancer research when his laptop and two hard drivers[sic] were stolen out of a car on April 21. He’s now pleading with Londoners to not only get the laptop back, but take theft more seriously.
Wow, it’s newer than I expected.
Still, not backing up that research when the material possibility, at least with git, has existed for five times your research’s lifecycle is… astounding. And I’m not even considering FTP backups!
Yup. Cloud accounts, university servers, hard copies, HDDs at home, HDDs in the lab - most of these were viable options that I used to back up my own research data before git even existed.
All of my personal projects go into an offsite git server if they’re text-based or a cloud account for binary data, with copies spread across all of my working machines.