AbstractThis unit presents a broad view of flow cytometry data management, emphasizing ways to create and manage data so as to maximize their immediate and long‐term usefulness. The cost in time, money, and effort to create data files in the first place argues for the importance of making full use of files and keeping them from getting lost or becoming uninterpretable. As flow cytometry measurements become increasingly complex, researchers have more and more reasons to reexamine old data. Careful data management is clearly necessary to ensure that stored data contain enough information about an experiment to enable analysis and interpretation by others even years later.