Love Data Week 9th - 13th February 2026

Love Data Week 2026 is here! This week is all about celebrating and appreciating data, recognising the work that goes into creating, analysing and preserving it, and committing ourselves to continue following best practices for data's future. This year's Love Data Week theme is "Where's the Data?", which aims to highlight the journey that data travels, from collection all the way to storage and preservation. Here at the EDC, we take great care to ensure that the data we hold is stored securely and persistently, while providing consistent access to all who are interested in our data. We pride ourselves on operating as a service for 25 years without a major outage! In this blog we will highlight some of the best practices of data management that the EDC team follow in order to protect the data that we store.

As a digital repository for datasets, publications and project metadata related to energy, we put the utmost importance in making sure that our content is not only maintained for long term storage but is also accessible in an intuitive format. One of the methods we use to achieve this is called 'Data Redundancy', which involves storing multiple copies of our data in different locations. This means that if there is if there is ever a problem with a digital object, whether that be related to the data itself with file corruption or if it is related to access to the data if a particular server is to go down, we are able to retrieve a copy of this data from one of these other locations. This allows us to ensure that we can still provide access to data when needed and makes sure that we are also continuing to preserve our data.

Well, once our data starts living in multiple locations, the question is how can we ensure all our copies are the same?

The method that can be used to check for this and protect data throughout its life in storage is with the use of Checksums. Checksums are a sequence of numbers that acting as a digital fingerprint that are unique to a file and are used to ensure it retains its integrity while being moved and accessed. By generating a checksum for a clean file when originally obtained, if any part of the file is changed or corrupted while it is moved from one place to another, the checksum for this file will now be different to the original recorded version. Monitoring our checksums of files to check for any changes while data is moved around our system allows us to keep on top of the integrity of our content and investigate any issues that might be causing changes during its transit.

These are just some of the practices that we employ at the EDC to preserve and store our data so that we can continue to provide quality data to all of our users! We hope that you enjoy Love Data Week 2026 and spend some time thinking about how you can best protect all the data that you love.