Notes from the Help Desk—Chris Nolan

Did you ever have to start over on a paper because your computer crashed, the network went down, or you deleted your only copy by mistake? Avoiding this type of disaster isn’t difficult if you follow this rule of thumb: 

Always save your work in at least two places!

No storage medium is perfect, so an extra copy is always your best bet.  There are several options you can use for backup storage, depending on your own computer hardware and personal preferences:

Ø      Your network (Y:) drive is a great option, because ITS backs up this server on a daily basis.  You can even access this drive from off campus now through My Briefcase on the campus portal (but see warning note below!).

Ø      The hard drive of your own computer (if you’re doing a large project and are a bit, shall we say, “thorough,” you might change Word’s default AutoSave to 2 or 3 minutes)

Ø      A USB flash drive (lots of storage, small size, usable on most computers if they have a USB port; one of the best options—BUT, make sure you use Windows’ Safely Remove Hardware option before removing the drive, or you may just corrupt all your files)

Ø      A CD (burn a permanent copy or use CD-RW to rewrite later changes)

Ø      A printed copy!  No power glitch to make you lose this one (just watch out for the family dog)

Ø      An e-mail copy (yes, as you finish a document or a substantial portion, tell MS Word or Excel to e-mail the document to yourself as an attachment; you can now get to this copy of your file from any computer with Internet access)

A couple of other tips when using Information Commons or lab computers:

Ø      When you create a new document, save it immediately to your network drive.  By default, Word will save it to the C: drive of the lab computer.  But when you log that PC off, your files are all erased from the C: drive!  Make sure they’re on Y: right from the start.

Ø      When you print a file, walk over and make sure you got what you needed before you delete the file on your PC.  This is especially valuable for database search results, full-text articles, etc., when you wouldn’t normally keep the web page contents. 

Ø      Use My Briefcase from off-campus; rely on your network drive Y: from campus. Note that when you open a file from My Briefcase, you are downloading a copy. Clicking Save in Word or Excel saves the file as a temp file to the local PC; it does not save it to My Briefcase. To save it to My Briefcase, save the file locally, then click on File+ on the My Briefcase screen and upload the file to the briefcase.

Return to the Fall 2007 Library Newsletter