After having a round of discussions with a project managers about data backup, I thought it might be useful to make public the findings, in particular to send the details to all REDCap users who have create project privileges. If the technical aspects of data management for your project are handled by other project staff then please forward this document on to them.

The REDCap server and the database have backup performed completely on a very regular basis. In addition, we have a daily database backup on the server. However a database backup is of limited use to individual project, as all of the REDCap projects are using the same underlying database, so if we were to restore last week’s database for one project then every other project would also go back one week. Clearly we can’t do this. To use the server backup for a single project, we would have to build a second server, restore a backup copy of the database onto the second server, then extract the single project data, then import this data onto the production server. This would take a large amount of time and would need to be charged accordingly.

A much better solution is for you to perform a weekly or daily backup of your own data. This would remove the reliance on any external services/resources, and has the added benefit that you have timed snapshots of your data, allowing you to check changes over time, and to develop standardised reports using scripts in your favourite stats software.

Even with the best backup solutions that we and ITS can implement, I would always feel more comfortable if I had periodic copies of my project data that I have personally stored elsewhere ... 25+ years of dealing with staff and student project work has made me cautious.

As always, you will need to ensure that your backup data is being stored securely in compliance with your ethics requirements.