1. HELPING CHEMISTS FIND JOBS IN A TOUGH MARKET. 2. TOWARDS A QUANTITATIVE UNDERSTANDING OF THE QUALITY OF THE CHEMISTRY JOB MARKET.
What's the job market like for chemists? Dude -- it's always bad.*
How bad is it? How the heck should I know? Quantifying the chemistry job market is what this blog is about. That, and helping chemists find jobs.
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(*For the literal-minded, this is a joke. Mostly.)
As someone who in fact also had their thesis/data stolen, let me additionally suggest backing up in multiple locations, and online. A laptop, external hard drive, and flash drive (as in my example) are insufficient when located in the same apartment/office, as I came to learn. Seems obvious now, but...
ReplyDeleteI am so sorry. That is horrible, awful.
DeleteVery good advice. I strongly encourage my students to use web-accessible backup (whether provided by my university or by a commercial site like Dropbox), telling them that it is never acceptable in my class for them to them claim that they "left their files at home."
DeleteOne word... Dropbox.
ReplyDeleteCarbonite!
ReplyDeletehow about even constantly emailing yourself files as you progress in your work ?
ReplyDeleteA review of offsite backup options
ReplyDeletehttp://www.macinchem.org/reviews/backup/backup.php
I was so paranoid when I was writing my dissertation (granted 12 years ago), I backed things up constantly on multiple CDs, kept one at home in a fire-proof box, one in the lab, etc.
ReplyDeleteI was so paranoid about something going wrong when writing my dissert 15 years ago (!) that I kept multiple *floppies* at different locations so if something happened, I wouldn't lose it all.
DeleteGuess what? My hard drive crashed! But I only lost about 4 hours or so of work, due to my constant backing up. Phew.
I will say that I was motivate by a very similar situation & sad story...in the early '90's, I saw a classified ad in the UCI newspaper, very similar to the story here...somebody doing a Geology PhD had their laptop stolen, and it had the only copy of their data, which was field work they had carried out in some remote location on another continent. It may be too late to help this person, but stories like this should be used to instruct future generations...
I just printed things after writing to proofread. Always kept a hard copy and a copy on a multiple flash drives.
ReplyDeleteOn a side note after my industrial postdoc went south, I had to finish my work in a Rutgers lab. During teaching hours, the doors to the building were always open but after that the doors were locked and you could only enter via keycard access. However, once inside the building, locked doors were a rare thing to stumble upon even when people were no longer in the labs and had left for the day.
There a reason Lord gave us SyncToy.
ReplyDeleteFind the uncensored version to make an easy $1000
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely painful. I truly do feel sorry for this person, and I'm sure the fact that this tragedy was so easily prevented only makes him or her feel shittier. I'm not a pushy person by nature, but I really lay into my friends who don't have a good backup system...I've known too many people who lost years worth of files (mostly photos from their digital camera, but also data loss from work projects) There are lots of free and convenient solutions for backing up...as others have said, Dropbox or Sugarsync give you 5GB for free and you have to do nothing whatsoever except occasionally hook to the internet. That should more than cover papers / powerpoints and thesis files, and you get the bonus of being able to bring up the latest copy and work on it even if you don't have your laptop handy. Use SynchToy or TimeMachine and a cheap external hard drive or three if you need more space or just don't trust the cloud (but that's irrational too...physical loss like hard drive failure, laptop theft or a home/car break-in are each more likely than randomly being targeted for a hacking).
ReplyDeleteMost probably, we all labored a thesis research, so, it is easy to empathize with the poor man's desperation. But at the same time, there is the frustration over his negligence. He's definitely innocent of the crime, but he can't wash his hands clean from not backing up such important files. That is almost crime in this digital age! When did this happened, by the way? Ruby @Williams Data Management
ReplyDeleteIt is certainly sad for the guy who lost his laptop. Just imagine how he spent grueling five years working on his thesis research paper. Backing it up would really be a good idea for all people to help thesis be secured, and it would not only for those who are writing their thesis. Anyway, I hope everything would be alright for the guy.
ReplyDelete