Scenario
You’ve already earned yourself the File accidentally deleted or Spilled drink on keyboard badge, just to discover that the universe is running a buy one get one free promotion and you realize that you are the proud owner of the Neglecting backup badge as well.
You had thought about backup once or twice at the beginning of your project, but you ran into problems setting up an automated backup routine and you decided to do it manually every Friday … then every month and after three months you stopped. Afterall you keep your data in a folder that syncs to a cloud service. Now it turns out the deletion or the corrupted file was faithfully synced to the cloud.
Solution
Backup should be automated. You should have at least three instances of your data: two locally on different media and one off-site. Do not put off setting up your backup routine. Don’t convince yourself that just because nothing happened the last two years nothing will happen in the next. Redundancy of storage is not an unnecessary expense, redundancy is essential to keep your data safe.
Set up a backup routine now, e.g. following the DCH Project Data Storage Guidelines. 2023. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7760967.