Rich

Those of us who remember mainframes (CDC 2000 at LSE, Dec-10 and Vax cluster at PNL) learned the hard way to keep three copies of everything in rotation.  I lost a lot of data at PNL because it was seen as a teaching institution and some good student run surveys were lost during routine “spring cleaning“ until I sussed out what was going on.  When I retired an alert operator gave me seven 2,000ft mag tapes which she’d created for me as a personal back-up.  These spent a couple of years languishing in the UK Data Archive at Essex University before it transpired they no longer had a Dec-10, when they returned them together with two CDs to which everything had been copied. 

Before I could get SPSS for Windows on a PC, and because my exiting PC was DOS based, I’d had to borrow a Windows machine and learn Windows first.  See: http://surveyresearch.weebly.com/old-dog-old-tricks-using-spss-syntax-to-beat-the-mouse-trap.html   Of course, SPSS couldn’t read any of my old *.sys files or many of the others until I realised that they had edition numbers tagged on to the extensions.  When I changed all the *.sys to *.sav and got rid of the edition numbers, everything worked fine.  Some data are still on 5” floppies, some on 3½ but few PCs have these any more.  Essex are only interested in “big data” so I am the only repository for some smaller surveys, for which I been unable to track down the original researchers or to obtain permission to deposit, but Edinburgh have recently taken one off my hands: hopefully they will eventually take more.

Nowadays I always save SPSS files with matching names for *.sps and *.sav files (sometimes *.spv as well) each edition being numbered or lettered in sequence.  Files are also backed up to at least one external drive, sometimes two.  Most of the stuff I work on these days goes to the UKDS archive at Essex as well, so that’s a fall-back if necessary.

Just got a new PC (Lenovo ThinkCentre E73 desktop (64-bit, Win7Pro win8.1 pro, Core i7 - 4790s 8GB 1TB C: drive, DVDRW with additional Kingston 8GB DDR3 1600 Mhz 1.5V Non-ECC DIMM memory, Office 2016, giving 16gb RAM in total.) which keeps offering me cloud storage, but I’m a bit of a Luddite and prefer to keep stuff where I can see it.  It has taken me three weeks to get SPSS 24 on the new machine, but I succeeded at last this morning. 

Copied to Research Data Management list as it is relevant to their concerns.

John F Hall (Mr)

[Retired academic survey researcher]

Email:   [log in to unmask] 

Website: www.surveyresearch.weebly.com

SPSS start page:  www.surveyresearch.weebly.com/1-survey-analysis-workshop

PS  Outlook 2016 is a nightmare, so I’m still using Outlook 2013 on the old machine.

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