Backup Policies

Any course involving computer use requires that the student be a responsible technology user. That means saving work regularly, not simply at the end of your work session, keeping printouts and backups of your work, and essentially doing all you can to insure that you don't lose work because of a preventable computer problem. So here are the rules for my courses on backups of electronic materials; these rules are the same for face-to-face and online courses.

If you use a flash drive, this sounds horribly obvious, but don't leave it in the computer lab! You also will need to keep copies of your files in another location, in case you do lose your drive.
If you use floppy disks, y ou are required to use a disk carrier; do not simply stick your disks in your bookbag or toss them in the back seat of your car. Disks are easily damaged this way, and they may also damage the computers you use them in if the door comes off in the a drive.
Save your work often as you write. I usually save every few minutes, and at least after every paragraph (if I'm feeling particularly paranoid, after every sentence). Do not wait until you've finished an entire paper to save it.
Keep two copies of your work. You may want to save something on your disk and then save it again on another disk, or on the hard drive of your computer at home. You can also attach your document to an email to yourself, or even in a worst case scenario cut and paste the text into an email.
Keep your two copies in separate places. What if you lose your bookbag with your disk carrier?
Do not save work to the hard drive of a lab computer and expect to find it again. Lab computers at USCL are ghosted frequently, erasing all work saved on the hard drives (and this is the case with most public lab facilities). You may save a file on one of those computers, return and find it still there--but it may also disappear between one class and the next.
Print your work out periodically. If after all these precautions you lose your work (which is, believe me, entirely possible), at least you can scan your text into the computer again if worst comes to worst.
If you're writing a lengthy post in Blackboard, write it in a word processing program and paste it into the message box in the discussion forum when you're done. That way you can save your work as you write (which you can't do in Blackboard), and you won't lose everything if your browser crashes or if Blackboard freezes up (which it does regularly).
Don't wait until the last minute to do your work. Procrastination is never a good thing, and computers seem to sense when you have only 15 minutes left to do your work.

Remember that if you lose your paper because you aren't careful about maintaining copies and saving files, that's not a computer error--that's carelessness on your part.

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This page copyright 2000-2007 by Lisa Hammond | last update 23 January 2006