"Active" or "Working" storage refers to the where you store your data while you're collecting and accessing it during the course of a project. Some storage options will better meet your project's needs, others not so much.
UMBC has a campus-wide subscription to Lab Archives for data collection and research documentation. It allows all research team members to work together and communicate, with granular access control, change history, offsite disaster-recovery back-ups. and more.
Box (UMBC FAQ), Google Drive (UMBC FAQ ), and Microsoft OneDrive are available to UMBC Faculty, Staff, and Students. DoIt has a chart comparing Box and Google Drive, here: https://wiki.umbc.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=31916775.
Factors to consider when choosing where to store your data:
- Anticipated size of dataset--Will you exceed space quotas? Will a cloud service readily upload and download files of that size?
- Computational requirements--Do you need high speed/performance processors for large scale analysis? If so, consider using the UMBC High Performance Computing Facility (you'll need to use the Linux operating system). This isn't appropriate for data storage that doesn't need to use the HPCF processors. It also doesn't provide backups or version control like the cloud storage, so you'll need to manage that yourself.
- Sharing capabilities and permission settings--Do you have a project team that will need to access the data? Do you want to limit what student assistants or other project participants can do?
- Version control--Will it be helpful to have a history of the changes made to your data? Will your storage do this automatically for you? Or do you need to design and use a version control table?
- Backup--Will it backup your data? Or do you need set up a backup?
- Security--Will it meet IRB standards for storage of human subjects data? Is the data encrypted? Does it use secure transmission channels? Does it require strong passwords?
