Backup Media

Purpose of this best practice: Backups are critical for all project data and provide the ability to recover from unintended events.

Principal Investigator (PI): The Principal Investigator is responsible for identifying appropriate backup policies, including backup media.
Study Coordinator (SC): The Study Coordinator should understand the backup model, media, and recovery process and should also be aware of policies regarding data storage and protection.
Data Manager (DM): The Data Manager is responsible for creating backups and ensuring security requirements are maintained.
Data Analyst/Biostatistician: The Data Analyst/Biostatistician should also be included in the planning, as their work often occurs in a separate environment and will likely require a separate backup plan.

Backups are best made to media that will provide stable data storage and long-term accessibility.
While network storage options will likely be the primary backup storage resource, the PI may chose to maintain a separate backup environment on external device/media (cloud resource, external HDD, DVD/Flash Drive).
Security should be considered when selecting the backup media. Many external HDD's and flash drives provide built-in encryption. If using a device that does not provide native encryption, use a tool such as WinZip, 7-Zip (free), or TrueCrypt (still available for free, but no longer supported by the developer) to create encrypted data.
Backup media should be stored in a secure location. Maintaining a backup copy offsite or in a different location on the campus enhances the disaster recovery model, as long as the data is encrypted properly.
Consideration should be given to JHU/SOM Data Trust policies that will have much more stringent requirements regarding storage of data containing PII/PHI.
Technology changes over time and consideration should be given to the media chosen for backups.

[Guides on Data Security & Backup](https://guides.library.jhu.edu/dataservices/data/manage)