Posted by Victoria Walker
My data storage “plan”:
Project, course, and outreach files are backed up daily to Box since it theoretically has unlimited free storage. The operational satellite data (excluding auxiliary files) are archived to our server and downloaded to my external drive. My computer itself doesn’t have the storage capacity for all the data.
My worst data nightmare (in two parts):
1) I updated my operating system w/o thoroughly thinking it through. I dedcided to repartion the drive as I had all the operational satellite data on an external disk. I made a point to also save copies of all my re-processed data from the internal disk.
2) Before reinstalling, I managed to knock the external hard disk off my desk. I was unable to (easily) retrieve that contents after the fall.
I ended up having to re-run my cases as all the re-processed data was lost. Thankfully I had uploaded most (but not all) of my auxiliary files to Box and the operational L1C and L2 data I had “lost” had been archived to our server. I didn’t end up losing any of the raw data, but it took time I didn’t have to re-download all my files and re-run the processor.
To keep this from happening again, I’ve got it set up to automatically upload my data, both operational and re-processed, to Box every 6 hours. I also wrote a just-in-case script to download everything from my SMOS data folder in the background.