Please back up your work. Make an electronic copy, not just a hard copy. Some of the work you do in college will be valuable in promoting yourself as you become a young professional. It may be the only experience you have in your field of choice. I still go back and use some of my work from my first year of college. It sounds crazy but I need content when I am writing lesson plans or demonstrating software. I used some school projects when I created my electronic portfolio. When applying for a teaching position I demonstrated my ability to create lesson plans by using plans I created during student teaching . I appreciated not having to recreate that content.
Why do you need a backup plan and what are we talking about? When you have something that is important to you and it must be done. It is always a good idea to have a backup plan in place. Say you have $100 tickets to see Prince in concert and it would break your heart if you missed it. You would make sure you had a way to get to the concert. If your car broke down, you would call a cab. That is a backup plan; it is what is in place when something fails. When it comes to your work, it is important that you back it up. If you write a 20 page paper and it takes you two weeks to pull it all together, you do not want to lose that work. It would be painfully annoying to have to redo it. For example, you have the file on your computer, it has not been turned in yet and someone swipes your laptop; what are you going to do? Well, if you have backed up your work to a flash drive or external hard drive, you can easily retrieve it. Yeah! If not, you get an extension from your professor and redo it. Key reasons to backup your work (computer files)
- Equipment can fail, you could lose all of your files
- Class work can be very lengthy and time-consuming
- Time is important
Quick Instructions:
- Plug in an external hard drive
- Double click on “My Documents”
- Navigate to the files you want to back up
- Double click on “My Computer”
- Open your external hard drive by clicking on it (it may take a double click depending on your computer settings) It will not be Drive C.
- Select the files you want to copy (it could be a folder, hold down the shift key as you select if you want to select multiple files)
- Click “CONTROL C” or right click on your mouse and select “Copy”
- Put your mouse in the window of your external hard drive
- Click CONTROL V” or right click select “Paste”
Now the files you selected will be copied to your external hard drive.
To use Google Docs for back up storage, check out the Google Docs page to see how to upload files. This is a viable place to back up current work. You will have access to it anytime you have access to the web. You only have one gig of space to work with though. That is a lot of Word files but if you are working with high quality pictures or videos it will not be enough space.
This PDF contains a video to help you with backing up your work backupDemo3_1 (It will take a few minutes to download, video streaming cost extra in WordPress, sorry). Before you hit continue in the video, reduce your magnification to 75% for best results. If you do not have the Adobe PDF reader you can get a free download at http://get.adobe.com/reader/ .
