[starbuck3733t]

Originally Posted by pHaestus

Bill:

Universities are even worse for IT budget and maintenance.

I have over $100k annual budget for research - every bit of which is done on PCs whether they control instruments, run models, or simply analyze data and type papers. My IT support infrastructure is my damn self, and I am also the network admin. My initial data management/protection budget was $0, but I had a notebook hdd die out of the blue and lost a month of work and now I try my best. My backup method is a 200GB hdd in an external USB2 box. I drag it from lab instrument to lab instrument (they aren't networked to stop students from installing viruses and wasting time on them) and back up my own notebook 1x a week automatically and every time I finish anything manually. Once a month a DVD-R is burned for archival and stored offsite (my house). Rudimentary but I feel better at least now.

My job is in educational research too - where do you do yours?. I work for penn state university, materials research institute. I'll give you one guess as to what we research