If You Don’t Disaster-Proof Your Bench Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later

I was recently in Nashville, TN when a storm of the century hit the area.  What started out as a typical thunderstorm, escalated to a relentless pounding by thunder, wind and rain.  After two days of flooding and landslides, many homes and businesses were destroyed and clean water was a luxury. The tragedy highlighted just how quickly things can go from sunny to scary and while we may have insurance on our homes, we surely don’t take out a policy on our bench.  But that could be a big mistake…

How do these words make you feel: Fire. Theft. Hard drive or Freezer crash?  Probably something like this: Panic. Stress. Sweat. Nausea.

As scientists, we know that a well-designed experiment considers all of the “what if’s”.  What if the result was caused by an off-target effect?  What if ligand binding actually activates two distinct signaling cascades?  But we rarely ask ourselves the other important questions- What if there was a disaster in lab?  What if the freezer went down?  What if an earthquake/tornado/hurricane destroyed everything?

I’d rather dive naked into a pool of lemon juice and broken Snapple bottles than be faced with losing everything in the fifth year of grad school.  Luckily, there are a few simple steps you can take to disaster-proof your bench and ensure that our sixth year in a lab is not spent repeating our second year.

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Step 1. Back-up your computer.  Now.

If you’re not backing up regularly, you absolutely must start.  Hard drives die with very little advanced warning and once they’re gone, they’re gone.  I had a drive die on me two months into my postdoc, just a week before I was to give a talk at a departmental retreat in a completely new field.  Not a relaxing time – and data recovery companies know this.  In what might possibly be the most “is-this-actually-legal” revenue model since “cash-4-gold”, data recovery companies will “try” to recover as much as they can – with no guarantees.  Oh, and it will be $3000 for that “try”… Unfortunately, your panic will actually convince you that you need to roll the dice, when in actuality, you may end up paying $3000 only to partially recover the Clay Aiken album you secretly downloaded.

Here are some options:

External hard drive. The cost of external drives has come down significantly over the last several years, with prices as low as 5-6GB per dollar.  Western Digital, Clickfree, Seagate and Iomega are a few of the household names in the space. Here’s a recent CNET review of some of the name brands mentioned.

Local server. Many labs backup on a shared server.  These are great, because both you and your PI can usually access it remotely.  This makes sharing data easy and potentially saves you from the 2am call from your PI asking you to send a piece of data to them at a conference asap.

With both External hard drives and Local servers, back-up can be scheduled automatically, so that’s one less thing to worry about.  For particularly important documents/data, I used to burn a DVD occasionally and take it home.  OCD?  Maybe.  But if something happens to the lab, it’s probably taking your external drive down with it.

Virtual backup. To ensure disaster or theft doesn’t destroy everything in one fell swoop, backups should be kept in an off-site location.  A number of companies (including BackBlaze, Carbonite, CrashPlan, iDrive, Jungle Disk, Mozy, Norton, and SugarSync) now offer online backup capabilities at very reasonable prices.  While some offer free backup (up to 2GB), a full-computer backup may run you upwards of $50/year.  At first pass, this might sound steep, but this means you could backup your computer for 60 years for the cost of one data recovery effort – seems like a no-brainer.

Services vary in several features including pricing (flat rate vs. fee/GB), customization of backup and location of stored files (comparison chart).  We’re all for the little guy, heck we are one, but in the case of data back-up we’d like to be sure that the company will still be around when we have our emergency.  So sites like Jungle Disk, which give the option of hosting with name brand servers like Rackspace or Amazon – may look more appealing for this reason.

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Step 2. Back-up your plasmids/reagents

Many things can destroy an otherwise perfectly good sample.  A friend of mine once troubleshot a simple transformation for two weeks straight.  He changed the buffers, used new cells, made new plates- the works.  It wasn’t until he ran the DNA stock on a gel that he found the previously well-formed band to be a degraded smear- the entire stock was contaminated. That construct was custom-built and took over two months to clone.  That was the only stock.  Not a good day.

To avoid disaster, split off a few microliters of the stock into a separate tube, kept in a separate box, ideally in a separate freezer.  Some labs keep back-up freezers in a basement or a freezer farm.  If your lab doesn’t have a second freezer, it’s worth asking a friend or neighbor in another lab if you could put a box or two in their freezer.  It’s usually not a big deal, and you can even offer to swap boxes so they can back-up in yours.  It may sound like too much extra work, but consider how you’d feel if all of your freezer boxes were ruined and it was back to square one.  Now re-consider how long it would take to aliquot a little of your most precious materials.

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Step 3. Back-up your notebook

In How to Keep a Lab Notebook, we describe the basic requirements for properly documenting experiments.  While electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) are growing in popularity in industry, many academics are still required to maintain hard copy notebooks in lab.  Obviously, ELNs backed up off-site or in a safe room require no further action.  However, paper-based notebooks are a bit of a different story.

An easy way to guarantee your most precious protocols/data are not lost is to Xerox the important stuff.  “Important stuff”?  Everytime you write something in the notebook, just ask “If this was lost, would it make me ____ (angry, cry, want to quit, happy…)?” Based on this, you’ll know when it’s worth a minute of your time to go make some copies.  A file folder at home with the highest priority copies will guarantee that should a lab tragedy occur, you won’t be back to square one.

Beyond protecting ourselves from loss, there is a tremendous mental release when we know we’re backed up.  It’s stressful worrying about what would happen if a fire ripped through lab or if a freezer died.  With six years of our lives invested in graduate school or a postdoc, let’s make sure the “what if” is no big deal.

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Any other suggestions to disaster-proof your bench?

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