I have experience with SciNote ELN and can definitely recommend it. You can upload and manage all your research data from it and it offers a bunch of other useful features (e.g. inventory management, team collaboration, MS office integration etc.) as well.

You can find it here www.scinote.net

Hope it helps!

I can see the appeal of this. On the other hand, as a lab supervisor, I have to say, I can see problems. In the lab I run, I like my people to be able very quickly to write down lots of information for later access. Although a digital note book would be neat, tidy and easy to access, the downside is that it would be less likely to be a good ongoing record of your observations. As a lab supervisor, I would much rather see a stained lab book that has been at the researcher's bench and is full of information, than a tidy computer version.

There are a few situations where I have used and permitted others in my lab to use a tablet to gather data and directly enter number in an Excel template file on a tablet.

One of the selling point of this method was that if one gets smudges of blood or urine on gloves, but uses a stylus to enter data, everything stays clean and tidy. The stylus can be washed and rinsed with 70% alcohol.

Large data set of daily blood glucose levels and body weights from decent size groups of mice or rats produce fairly large set of numbers; they can be directly transferred to a computer, minimizing errors in typing dozens of values, each in 3 or 4 digits.

The idea seemed good for saving time.

Having stated the obvious potential advantage, I have always insisted that all data be entered in a lab note book (bound-paper version, not the 3-hole-punched-lose-leaf version). This way, I can go decades back and find what is needed.

I would suggest using both methods, as we do. Have lab note books and transfer data in your preferred software/database. This allows you to quickly plot data in your desired application (we normally prefer Prism over Excel). In which order you use one or the other is a matter of what seems faster, convenient and reliable to you but do not overlook redundant backup, including paper notebooks.

The advantage of having bound paper notebook becomes evident over a long period of time (decades) when computer and software incompatibilities become obvious and very tedious.  In our case, we may be somewhat fortunate because our IT folks perform automatic backup of all data on RAIDS, minimizing the possibility of loss of data. However, in many labs it is not uncommon to see that data are not backed up for weeks or even months. Hard drives and SSDs do fail...

In our lab we keep the traditional hard-copy notebook/scratch notebook inside the lab but we also keep electronic notebooks with experiment description and results. What has worked well for us is OneDrive and Dropbox. You can link the data files to the OneDrive document and share it by saving it and the changes made to it on Dropbox. It had been working very well for us, especially when lab members are travelling or are at a different site but keep working on our lab's projects.

In our lab I started using Microsoft OneNote and after that everyone else liked it. You can make private notebooks or shared notebooks with ability of attaching any kind of file at everywhere along the text. Its very applicable and good for both supervisor and lab members. Once people are leaving the lab just make a copy of their work and send it to supervisor and they can also keep a copy for their further research. Also since it tracks record of users its very straightforward to trace who is modifying what and what information is added by whom into the notebook.

I have tried a few in the past few years and frankly most of the options fell short. One new digital lab notebook option that I heard about is 'Benchling'. It is free, and though I have not given it a shot, it looks promising.

Another option (though on the expensive side) that our lab has implemented a while back is using a smartpen. We use Livescribe, but there are few other options too. You buy the pen and notebooks that work with them (this is where the $$ come in). The pen digitizes all your free-hand notes automatically (it can also tag, make voice recordings etc), which can be uploaded and archived as desired. That way you go about things like you normally do i.e. write in a handy notebook in lab, but with the added convenience of them getting automatically digitized.

https://benchling.com/

Thank you very much for answering!

I  think a digital lab notebook would be best accompanied by a suitable software documenting and archiving all files and documents, e.g. protocols, result "pictures", sequence alignments... So you will have all data at one place where you can easily search anything. But as here I understand that many won't give up the paper version. Maybe it would be best to combine both.

I recently read something about a malware or virus of sorts which encrypts all data on a machine as well as network, making them unaccessible to users. The producer of such nefarious work demands a ransom from the computer/network owner to provide the decryption key.

Such a situation does not bode well for shared data over the servers or as they like to call it these days, clouds... just something to think about. 

I have experience with SciNote ELN and can definitely recommend it. You can upload and manage all your research data from it and it offers a bunch of other useful features (e.g. inventory management, team collaboration, MS office integration etc.) as well.

You can find it here www.scinote.net

Hope it helps!