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RDM Wise Practices Guidelines

File Management

To help ensure that you and your research team are using the appropriate version of your data and to minimize confusion regarding copies on different computers and/or on different media, keep track of your data during and after your research project with:

  • Logical file structures
  • Informative naming conventions, and
  • Clear indications of file versions

Be careful to:

  • Avoid overwriting your original data with a cleaned version.
  • Protect your original data by locking it or making it read-only.
  • Refer to this original data if things go wrong (as they sometimes do).

Planning how you are going to name your files will help you organize and find the files and avoid mistakes or duplication.

Naming Conventions

  • Be consistent.
  • Give each file a brief and descriptive name, which may include a combination of elements such as date, location, and researcher’s surname.
  • Put the elements in a particular order to facilitate sorting.
  • Use underscores or hyphens instead of spaces to separate the elements.
  • Use letters and numbers instead of special characters, e.g., ~ ! # $.
  • Standardize the date for chronological sorting, e.g., YYYYMMDD or YYYY-MM-DD.
  • Include a number at the end to indicate the version (if applicable), for example:
    • Original document: Bisondata_1.0
    • Original document with minor revisions: Bisondata_1.1
    • Document with substantial revisions: Bisondata_2.0
  • Document the naming convention.
  • Ensure that all members on the research team understand and use the convention.

Medium- to High-risk Data

  • Personal information should be segregated from the other information collected, and copies of personal data stored in a separate location from the original.
  • Linking files/keys that identify the data should be encrypted and stored on separate storage devices or systems than the de-identified data it identifies, ideally on a different platform (e.g. encrypted internal/external hard drive) or in a different partition of the same storage platform with its own specific security and access in place.
  • Researchers should transcribe video and audio recordings and limit access to transcriptions and any audio or visual data. Original recordings should be deleted if they are no longer needed. 

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