The Fight for Space
I’m sure most of you have run into a situation that I’m facing. I bought a new laptop 2 years ago with a 90 GB hard drive. Actually you only get 88+ GB of usable space out of this kind of drive. I could have bought a bigger drive, but remember thinking, “there’s no way I’m going to run out of space before this PC is obsolete”. Do you have any idea how many times I’ve said that over the years? I didn’t even notice that I had gradually accumulated almost 80 GB of stuff. My PCs performance was gradually falling off and I remember thinking that I needed to do some system tweaking. That’s when I saw the overload. It has been recommended to have a minimum of 10% of your hard drive available to be used as virtual memory. The first fix was pretty easy, get rid of excess files, remove unused programs, running defrag, etc. That lasted for a few months, now I’m back to where I was before.
I had preached before about the importance of having good external backups and disaster recovery systems. My good works paid off when my 4 year old external terabyte drive died a few weeks ago. I was also periodically burning DVDs, annually to preserve archive information in addition to keeping it on the terabyte drive. I only lost a month of two of semi-important information in the end.
I found that the price and size of terabyte external drives had dropped enormously over the past few years so decided to buy 2 terabyte USB drives, keep them on-line all of time and structure my information warehouse, disaster recovery plan and PC hard drive management accordingly.
The first place to start is deciding what kinds of information do you really need to cart around on your PC no matter where you are. This logic should be the same whether you have a home office like me or work in a corporate environment.
Let’s first consider your email files. For many of us, this means Outlook. Unless you constantly refer to old email information move your archive pst files off of your PC. It is very easy to access in a repository if/when you need it. We’ll talk more about other ways to manager your emails next month. There is a lot to learn!
So do you really need to carry around ALL of your information? Organize by year. That way you can decide whether to carry around only new stuff and maybe some old stuff. If you don’t have it sorted by year you will not have a choice. No big trick here. If you organize by year, then you will have to capability in the future to destroy old information too. If you keep it in a big jumble, the percentage of worthless information will continue to accumulate. And some day, you will run out of room, just like your attic or basement.
Getting back to disaster recovery, now that I have 2 external terabyte drives, I run my backups, using Microsoft utilities once a week writing to alternate drives. All of my libraries and a system image are saved. If one of the external drives goes kaput, I have the other.
Yes I know that if my house blows up, all may be lost. I’ll play the odds for now. There are other redundancies I could work in like keeping a copy of my stuff in “the Cloud” but I really don’t want to go there.
My success story is that I now have control over how much I store on my PC. The only factor that will change this is the installation new software. When this occurs, I try to uninstall something that I rarely if ever use.
What’s new?
Records Management / Archiving
Iron Mountain acquired Mimosa Systems, a provider of content archiving solutions. The move gives Iron Mountain “on-premises” archiving and data protection capabilities, joining existing SaaS-based offerings.
Recent AIIM research (http://www.aiim.org/marketiq) found that 90% of organizations are using the PDF file format for long-term storage of scanned documents, and 89% are converting Office files to PDF for distribution and archive. Not surprisingly, paper is currently used by 100% of organizations, but when asked to predict the situation in 5 years time, use of paper for long-term storage dropped to 77%, whereas PDF rose to 93%.
ELN / LIMS
The NeuroScholar Project is the flagship project for the Biomedical Knowledge Engineering Research Group at the Information Sciences Institute in Marina Del Rey.
The NeuroScholar system is the flagship application of this project but they have developed other tools to be used in conjunction with the system. These deliver specialized functionality to a neuroscience knowledge user such as the ‘Electronic Laboratory Notebook’ (ELN), support for schematic diagrams (Diagrammar) and neuroanatomical mapping functions (NeuARt II). The NAWS system is a method for using NeuroScholar to be able to run analyses on it’s contents as a remote webservice, and the Sangam project is concerned with intergrating information between different web services (of which NeuroScholar could be one). They have also built software engineering tools to assist with the construction of NeuroScholar-like knowledge bases. This subsystem is called the ‘View-Primitive Data Model framework’ (VPDMf’).
