Posted by Jared Flater
My worst data nightmare…would probably be losing all of my data, may that be through user error or hardware failure. Not surprisingly, this happened to me a few weeks ago during an intensive bioinformatics workshop; it’s week long afair with lots of data wrangling going on. We were staying in dormatories, the workshop was at Michigan State’s Kellog Biological Station, where I had my laptop charging for the night. I woke up in the morning, grabbed my computer, and headed down to the classroom to start that days activities. I sat down and pulled out my computer, poped it open…and nothing. Just a black screen. I quickly started panicing…all that work so far! My masters project data was on there too…yikes…this wasn’t good. I handed my computer to Fan, the apple doctor in our lab, and she worked her magic, but to no avail. The hardrive was gone. Computer was dead and I was in trouble! Or so I though, but I’m lucky to be part of a great lab with a great advisor and she quickly ordered me a new computer, next day air! The computer arrived and I was able to get back into the workshop. One thig was still bothering me though, and that was my data that should have been backed up. Luckily for me, I had inadvertently saved my spreadsheets containing all my raw data in my google drive folder, that had automatically synced to the cloud. However, all my other files and projects were lost. This was more of a headache than anything though, as all the files were old an no longer needed. Now all my work is saved in my google drive folder as well as saved weekly to an external HDD. My goal is to always be ready for that moment when your realize everything is gone and not panic, but get back to my data analysis as smoothly as possible.
Jared