One advantage of a web-based system like MorphoBank is that time-consuming maintenance tasks such as data backup can be centralized. MorphoBank runs on servers hosted by the San Diego Supercomputing Center at the University of California, San Diego (http://www.sdsc.edu). These servers are backed up nightly and serviced by a professional full-time staff of system administrators.

This is all well and good, but how do you know that your data is safe? Sometimes there's nothing more reassuring than having a copy of your data on your own machine, or even several of your own machines. And maybe a few copies on DVD as well.

This is where the MorphoBank data backup tool comes in. The tool allows you to download a copy of your project data at any time. The copy is a snapshot of the project data at the time the backup was initiated.

The backup includes copies of all the originally uploaded media files, so for some projects the download will be quite large. You should balance your need for an up-to-date backup with the required download time. However, we encourage all projects to perform a backup on a monthly basis, or more frequently if required.

To backup your project, go to the Options tab and then click on the Data Backup tab. Then click on the "Download Project Data" button, which will initiate the creation and download of a ZIP-format archive. For large projects, be patient. The creation of the ZIP archive can take some time.