Archiving your data

Log in to your research environment.

The data in your research group is a set of files and folders. To archive (a part of) this data, it is important that:

• the folder structure meets the requirements of your research environment - please contact your data manager to find out the required folder structure within your environment;
• it complies to naming conventions of files and folders;
• it has appropriate metadata (see step 3).

This ensures that other researchers understand the semantics of the data, how it was collected or generated, and it gives others information about the conditions for (re)use.
It is important to meet these requirements, because it helps to make your work findable for interested researchers. Besides, it helps you to make sure the data complies with privacy rules and regulations.

1) Go to the website portal and log in.  

2) Click on 'Research' in the menu (the black bar).

3) Go to the folder you want to archive. This is your 'data package'. Ensure you are in the folder that you want to submit to the vault.

4) Enter all mandatory metadata in the metadata form of the specific folder.

5) Press the 'Actions (Submit)' button.

If any metadata is missing, the Yoda system will tell you what metadata you need to enter. If all required metadata is present, the system locks the folder and its subfolders during the archiving process. This ensures that the data is not changed. Once all data is copied to the vault, the lock is removed automatically so you can access the data in your research group again.

The data manager will now perform an assessment on the data. He or she will check the compliance of your data package with privacy rules and regulations and assesses whether it is self-evident for other researchers. This should be fully correct. The data manager either approves the data package for archiving or suggests improvements. You will be notified by email.

You will see the vault of your research group in the Yoda portal once it contains at least one data package.

Everyone with access to your research group also has read-only access to the vault of your group.

If you want to submit a new version of your folder to the vault, repeat the above process. A new copy of the new folder will be placed in the vault. The old copy remains available and will not be overwritten.

If you want to copy a data package from the vault to your research group, follow these steps:
1) Go to the website portal and log in.
2) Find the vault folder you want to copy into your research group.
3) Click on the data package you want to copy and click on 'Copy data package to research area'.

It is important to make your data future-proof so that it can still be opened and reused by you or others in the years to come. As software and computer systems change and get updated, new file formats become available and older formats may disappear. Therefore, it is important to store your data in so called ‘preferred formats’ like .pdf and .txt. These formats are not linked to paid software and are thus future-proof. Here you find a list of preferred file formats.

If you want to keep your data in a vendor-specific format as well, you can export each file in a vendor-specific format to a preferred file format, and store this new version along with the vendor-specific format version.

If you want help converting files to preferred file formats, please contact your data manager.

You can check in Yoda whether your data is future proof by performing a check for compliance with policy.

1) Log in to Yoda.

2) Go to the files you want to check.

3) Go to ‘Actions’ and select ‘Check for compliance with policy’ from the drop-down menu.

4) Select the file format list you want to check your data with. You can find the list of DANS here and the list of 4TU here.

If there are any files that are not in preferred formats, you get a notification. However, you are still able to use those files.