As described further in 📁Filesystems, we use the TigerData service to back up data on the Princeton Research Computing clusters. A mount point for TigerData exists on the major clusters we use.
It is important for data management to be seamless and automatic. Therefore, you should consider using Syncovery (registration code in our group Dropbox) to copy data via SFTP from the scratch directory to TigerData on a scheduled (e.g. daily) basis. If you do this, however, be sure you set an email notice to warn you if a backup fails — you don't want to find out the copying wasn't working when you accidentally deleted the only copy on scratch. If using Syncovery, we recommend copying with compression enabled and to set up an exclusion mask on large files you may not need to copy (e.g. WAVECAR*, CHG*, AECCAR*) to reduce usage of disk space.
Cloud Storage
In addition to the above file systems, you also have access to a 25 TB group account on SharePoint that you can use to back up any research data to as well as 1 TB group account on Dropbox (see Group Accounts). SharePoint can be accessed from the OneDrive client if you prefer to have desktop access.
You can also request your own personal 1 TB Dropbox account if desired. Make sure that when you are preparing manuscripts that you are doing so from a cloud-based backup service.
Physical Storage
Group members can have a physical, portable SSD purchased by the lab. It can be used as desired for data backups. It is also quite useful if you need to do a ton of file I/O locally. For instance, if you want to unpack a zip file of 1 million files, it's better to do that on a portable SSD than on your local machine.