Help Desk

 Backing Up Important Data

You need to make back up copies of your important documents. Never have only ONE copy of anything important. Many things can cause you to lose important data such as a computer virus or hard drive failure and so on. So you should never trust a computer completely to back up your files.

• Try to keep data in two different places other than your computer. Place one copy on your computer and another on removable media.

• You can back data up on another computer, save to a floppy disk, burn it to a CD, e-mail it to yourself or use a ZIP disk. It is imperative to have another copy of important data because if it is lost it may be impossible to retrieve.

• Never have your only copy of something on a floppy disk. Floppies are known to be unreliable. (Several students come in with their only copy of something on a corrupted disk with the paper due the same, the next day or sometimes for the next class. This can be a big problem if the data is unrecoverable.)

• Utilize your H: drive. By using your H: drive you have access to your work from any computer on campus. It is a great way to backup your work.

• Having a printed copy never hurts in case you have to retype your data.

Videos on different ways to backup data will be coming soon!