When I came to the lab today, I tried turning on the computer, only to find that there were troubles with the booting sequence, in which the RAID hard drive was in a “degraded” status. I feared that the data was lost and that would prove a serious setback. I tried hitting “Ctrl+I” when I first rebooted the computer, and it proved promising, until the computer froze right after Windows 7 was accessed. But when I came to the computer technician, I had to run to the weekly departmental seminar, so I could only claim the aging computer (it was 8-10 years old at this point) after the seminar was over.
When the computer was fixed, I started zipping all the relevant files and then put the resulting zip files on Dropbox, which is a cloud storage service. Because I fear losing research-relevant files I made sure the entire content of the folders was saved. In the end, I accomplished something crucial but whose contribution to research is nonexistent.
Therefore one has to save the data regularly on an outside backup databank…
Physical purgatory 