Don't count on your computer or a lab computer as being your only backup, if the computer crashes your work can be lost. For this reason, it's a good idea to consider having a backup on a removable medium, like a cd-rom, zip disk, or memory stick.

There's also the ITP FileServer where data can be temporarily stored while you are preparing a more permanent place to back it up to.

Of the removable mediums, burning your data permanently to a writable (not re-writable) cd-rom, is the most likely to perserve your data as it cannot be accidently erased or reformatted.

Many of the computers in the labs are equipped with cd-rom burners and you can checkout cd-rom burners from the equipment room. Zip drives are also available for checkout.

When working on a project you might want to include time to do periodic backups to a cd-rom. In fact, I'd suggest making 2 cd-rom backups, just as a precaution.

This has the added value of preserving a record of each stage and version of your project, which can be part of any required or future documentation needs, as well as, allowing you to go back and retrieve something from an early version that you wish you hadn't removed from the current version.

Page last modified on July 18, 2006, at 03:20 PM