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Digital Preservation

This guide is meant to be an introduction to the practice of digital preservation. Use it to learn about the topic and how to ensure long term access to your own data.

Defining Personal Digital Preservation

Personal preservation deals with preserving personal digital collections that are not owned or created by larger institutions. This can include materials like digital images, text-based files, software-specific files, and data sets. 

Getting Started

Organizing Your Data

Before you begin actions to preserve your digital materials, it is important to make sure you organize your data in a way that makes sense to you. It is considered best practice to establish a file naming convention to be able to efficiently understand what a file is and what it contains. File naming conventions should typically be short, easy to read, and avoid special characters. 

Learn more about file naming conventions from these sources:

For more information on research data management as a whole, consult our Libguide on the subject:

Assess Your Data's Needs

  • If your data is related to UAB, make sure to identify it via the Data Classification Rule and plan to store it according to its security needs outlined by UAB.
  • Appraise your data to determine what is needed in the short and long term. For example, you may have four iterations of a presentation but will only want to preserve the final iteration in the long term. Decide what you want to prioritize preserving during this appraisal. 
  • If much of your data is saved as proprietary file formats, it may make accessing it at a later time difficult. It is recommended that you convert files to open formats to ensure their longevity. Read more about open formats in the links below. 

Next Steps

Store it via Back-ups

Backing up your data ensures you have at least one copy of it elsewhere, though multiple types of backups are encouraged. There are many ways to back-up data, including locally (on the device), externally (external hard drives), and via the cloud. UAB currently offers cloud storage through Box and OneDrive. 

Monitor Your Stored Data

  • Periodically checking the integrity of your data is vital to ensuring it remains uncorrupted while in storage. It is recommended that you check your files to make sure you can open and read them on a regular, scheduled basis.                           
  • You can also verify the integrity of your data by running checksums.

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