The digital voice recorders will contain recordings that are difficult or impossible to replace.  It is important that they be regularly backed up, to protect against loss.  The coordinator at each site has a portable hard drive, and participants are responsible for bringing voice recorders to be backed up at an agreed time, e.g. 1pm Wednesdays, if more than an hour of new material has been recorded since the last backup.

Portable hard drive

Each coordinator has a portable hard drive, a Western Digital Passport 320Gb, and this should always be kept in the office, and never loaned out.  It is powered via the USB cable.
It has the capacity for storing the contents of 640 full voice recorders.  Thus, each recorder can be backed up dozens of times without any risk of filling the hard drive.

Steps in Backing Up a Voice Recorder

1. Connect the voice recorder and the portable hard drive to the computer using the supplied USB cables.
2. Create a new folder on the hard drive consisting of the recorder id and the date, e.g. if we're backing up recorder G12 on the 15th of July, the folder would be G12-20100715.
3. Copy the five folders A-E from the voice recorder to the hard drive.  This takes less than a minute even for a full voice recorder.

Archiving

The audio recordings stored on the hard drives will be used as the basis for archiving.  For each recording there will need to be documentation (from the logbook) and signed permission from the speakers.  The audio files will be converted from WMA format to a non-proprietary format, and processed to filter any hiss from the recorders (example for file S01A02).