During the course of analysing data, it is likely that you will create several derivatives of the working copy, sometimes even automatically through scripts. Whether one of these versions is valuable and should be kept for long-term preservation is completely dependent on the data owner. However, it is recommended that versions are frequently monitored to discard those that are not required for verification, reproducibility, or transparency, amongst others.

You might want to keep all versions, but these can be very large files which will take up valuable storage space. Versioning is a key part of any workflow and appropriate measures should be taken to enable this, whether it is simply versioning through slight alterations to file names or using dedicated version control tools. The latter are also commonly used in large projects to allow multiple users to check-out and check-in the same file after making alterations. This also allows provenance, i.e. documenting or inspecting the history of changes.

Just as with backups, the first step is to find out what your organisation provides.