How do you keep track of information that was forgotten or lost

Question: How do you keep track of information that was forgotten or lost
- Keywords:
  information,
  work
Asked by anon-249270 to Zoya, Tom, Stacey, Laura, James, Connor on 9 Mar 2020.
- Connor Prior answered on 9 Mar 2020:
  
  We often have to upload our data to a secure server as a back up now. I have 4 back-ups at least of all my work! We generally have quite a good idea of how something works so we can improvise if we do lose it. However we have to record everything in our lab books!
- James Lees answered on 9 Mar 2020:
  
  I’m not sure I understand the question but i’ll try and answer as best I can.
  
  If the information is forgotten or lost then by definition you can’t really keep track of it. But as a scientist you don’t want to lose/forget anything.
  
  So you do your best to keep everything in order. Proper filing systems, spreadsheets, documents and keeping an up to date lab book. The hope is that even if you do forget something you wrote it down somewhere so when you need it you can find it again,
- Stacey New answered on 10 Mar 2020:
  
  As Connor and James said make sure you keep a note of information using lab books and on your computer. Always name files with sensible titles, I’m guilty of sometimes just naming them something random and then I can never find what I need. Always back up your work. I have 3 backups, two on different clouds online and one external hard drive.
- Zoya answered on 10 Mar 2020:
  
  Always write things down on paper, writing things down is the best way to remember things. I have learnt the hard way, I once lost a whole grant proposal 2 days before submission because of a software malfunction.
- Tom Scott answered on 10 Mar 2020:
  
  Having a great team of people to work with certainly helps as people more organised than me make sure we document and write down important things!
  
  For my research we gather a lot of data, always more than we need or can deal with, so part of science is finding and extracting the important things. That way we will have a wider set of data to refer to if something is forgotten or doesn’t quite make sense on its own.

Question: How do you keep track of information that was forgotten or lost

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