It is that time of year when final papers are being written, stress is upon students, and late nights are common.
Never leave a lab computer for any reason without first saving your document to a known location (flash drive, Gustavus home directory, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc). If you leave the computer or leave the computer idle for more than 20 minutes, the computer will reboot and your paper and/or changes will be lost. If you sign in as Gustavus, make sure you mount your Home Directory and save your file in your network folder or make sure you are saving to a flash drive. If you are signed in as yourself, your home directory will automatically load.
Gustavus Technology Services would like to remind everybody that backing up data and saving frequently is more important than ever – especially near the end of the semester – when large and very important papers or Powerpoints are being created.
When saving documents, make sure you check the location where you are saving the document. (home directory, flash drive) Always double check your save location.
If you are familiar with Google Drive, it is a great place to work on your paper. It will auto save your paper as you go, as long as you have an Internet connection. It will also keep track of your revisions, just in case you accidentally delete a page of your work, and accidentally save your paper again, which can sometimes happen in Microsoft products. Google Drive will allow you to go back to the previous edition. Once you are done creating the document, you can copy and paste your text into Microsoft Word and format it for turning in your work.
You can visit your Gustavus Google Drive at http://docs.gac.edu or if you have a GMail account, you can visit http://docs.google.com.
Great ways to back up your data:
- Flash Drive
- Home Directory
- Emailing it to a second email address such as GMail, Yahoo! Mail, etc (for backup purposes only)
- External Hard Drive (using Windows 7 backup utility or Mac OSX’s Time Machine utility)
- Creating incremental backups using any of the mediums mentioned. (just in case your document is corrupted)
Bad ways to back up your data:
- Just emailing it to yourself and using that as your only copy. However, you can email it to yourself and then work on it, but make sure you save as a new file to your Home Directory. If you just open it and save it, straight from your email, it will save it in the Temporary Internet Files, and once the lab computer is restarted, it will be gone. Be sure to Save As… in a file location you are aware of.
- Saving it only on your laptop’s hard drive.
If you think you may have lost your document or it has become corrupted AND you had saved it on your Home Directory, please stop by the Technology Helpline. We may be able to recover at least some of it. Always have your important paper on at least two different mediums. If your hard drive dies, you’ll be glad you saved it on your flash drive as well. It is also wise to have your document printed out at various stages through the process, especially if it is a long thesis paper.
If you have any questions or would like help saving files to your home directory, please stop by the Technology Helpline or visit our web page:
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