NSF CI Compass Guidance: Ensuring Availability and Disaster Recovery for High-Value Scientific Data

Authors: Ewa Deelman, Steve Jacobs, Jeffrey Glatstein

Abstract: High-value scientific data are often irreplaceable and essential to ongoing research operations, making robust data protection a critical responsibility for NSF-funded facilities. This guidance document outlines community-informed best practices for ensuring data availability, integrity, and recoverability through layered redundancy, geographic distribution, automated policy enforcement, and long-term preservation strategies. The report recommends maintaining multiple independent copies of critical data across distinct fault domains, distinguishing between replication, backup, and archival functions, and implementing safeguards against cyber threats, human error, and regional disasters. Additional guidance addresses infrastructure automation, integrity monitoring, edge buffering, governance, and cost sustainability. Collectively, these practices support NSF expectations for data stewardship, operational resilience, cybersecurity, and the long-term preservation and reuse of scientific data.