Many people do not take adequate precautions to protect their data in the event of a catastrophe. As students at Christ’s College you will have crucial documents and data on your computer that is too precious and taken too many hours hard work not to have a backup.

Often, we in the IT department, have encountered students panicking that their computer is not working and they have a thesis or dissertation due. The most common cause for this is hard drive failure and some simple steps can mean that the loss of your computer will not mean loss of your data.

• If it is getting close to the deadline for a document, and you are working on it intensively, try and take hourly backups of it as much as possible. A lot of work can be done in an hour and every hour can count as you approach the deadline.
• Backup all your important documents to memory stick or re-writable CD weekly (preferably more often).
• Take general backups of less used documents and data quarterly or monthly. CD’s are best for this as they cannot be written over once they are burned.
• Try and keep your documents in an organised fashion and in an area that is easily accessed. For instance, keep your documents in the ‘My Documents’ folder (Windows) or ‘Documents’ (Vista and Mac). Try not to save documents long term on the desktop, especially within folders stored there, it is very easy to forget these when doing a backup!

USB memory sticks are as little as £10 for 2 gigabytes worth. These are very useful, but also can become corrupted easily if you do not use the ‘Safely Remove’ option in Windows. Best practice would be to have a backup of your memory stick as well. A £20 outlay now could save you considerable time and stress at the time of a catastrophe.

CD-RW are available for about 50p each (when bought in bulk of 10 or more) and are re-writable. CD-Rs are discs that are much cheaper, but can only be written on once. If your machine has a DVD burner then DVDs are an option for storing very large amounts of data. All the PCs in 4/10 have CD & DVD burners if your own machine is not equipped with one.