4. Store

4. Store

The data that you collect, organise, prepare, and analyse to answer your research questions, and the documentation describing it are the lifeblood of your research. Put bluntly: without data, there is no research. It is therefore essential that you take adequate measures to protect your data against accidental loss and against unauthorised manipulation.

Particularly when collecting (sensitive) personal data it is necessary to ensure that these data can only be accessed by those authorized to do so. In this chapter, you will learn more about measures to help you address these threats.

If you wish to print out this chapter, you can download it here.

Main take-aways

After completing the chapter, you should be:

  • Aware of different storage solutions and their advantages and disadvantages;
  • Able to plan a storage strategy adequate to the needs of your project;
  • Able to plan a backup and disaster recovery strategy to ensure that no data loss, e.g. through human error or hardware failure, will occur during the project;
  • Able to decide when and how to protect your data against unauthorised access with strong passwords and encryption.
  • Able to answer the DMP questions which are listed at the end of this chapter and adapt them to your own DMP.

This chapter is based on information which was put together by the UK Data Service (2022), the online course Research Data MANTRA (Research Data Service, University of Edinburgh, 2022) and Essentials 4 Data Support (RDNL, n.d.).

Main author of this chapter

Jonas Recker, GESIS Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences