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An InfoHelp How To...? Guide |
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When typing up an assignment, you need to make sure that your hard work is safe! The tips and guidelines in this document provide a combination of options to avoid disaster (Remembering that no individual method of saving is 100% reliable)
What are my Options? - A quick overview
Home Drive
Shared Drive
Floppy Disc
CD Burners
USB Drives
Email Attachment
Best Practices
What are my Options? - A quick overview
If you are working on one of JCU's General access labs you have access to several different ways to save and transport your work. Here are a few options and a brief description about them.
- Homes Drive - Your own personal storage space allocated by the university. This holds up to 10MB of storage and files stored here are available from all the GATCF computers as your I:drive, and from home via a web browser through StudentsOnline
- Shared Drive - A large temporary storage where files stored there are only available from the GATCF computer you are stilting at. Also known as E: drive on GATCF computers
- 3 1/2 inch Floppy Drive - Small, portable disk that can hold up to 1.44MB of storage. Also known as A: on GATCF computers
- CD Burners - Use either write-once or reusable media to hold up to 700MB of storage: Also known a F: on GATCF computers
- USB Drive - Sizes range from around 16MB up to multiple 1000's of MB. When plugged into a GATCF computer they usually show up as G: drive.
- Email Attachment - If your disc isn't working or your home drive is unavailable you can always send your work as an attachment via email. JCU email supports attachments of up to 20MB in size
- DVD Burner - Same as CD Burners but can store up to 4.7GB and only available in Library Workstations, BH149, WE024, and A204 in Townsville. Also library workstations in Carins.
Home Drive
Your home drive is your university allocated storage space. This drive is not actually stored on the computer you are sitting on - it is just made available when you log in. By default your home drive can store about 10 MegaBytes of data.
Ideally this is a good place to make short-term backups of your work as there really isn't enough space to keep all your documents and work on multiple new documents at the same time, especially if they include picture/video files.
The home drive is also used as the temporary storage space for a lot of common activities in the GATCF lab. Printing and saving documents usually requires a small amount of temporary space. If you experience troubles with either of these activites a good place to look is to see how much home drive space you have left ( 1 - 2 MB is a good number )
To see how much space you have used login to StudentsOnline and on the left hand menu under the title "Computing Information" there is a section called "Home Drive". From here you can see a a gauge with your used / free home drive space and links to accessing your home drive through the web browser.
Helpful Tips + Potential problems:
Be careful of how much you put on your home drive. It looks and acts like a hard drive in a computer but it is very easy to forget that the home drive doesn't have much space. 10 Megabytes is 30-40 Word Documents, but only 10-20 PDF files or 2-3 MP3's. You should only use your home drive for storing short-term backups of your work, not to download lecture notes to or email attachments. If you are looking for someplace temporary to store files use the Shared Drive.
For more information go to Accessing your Homes Drive
Shared Drive
This is a large temporary storage that is made available on all the computers in the GATCF labs. This storage area can hold about 1 gigabyte of data and the contents of it gets cleared once a day during the early hours of the morning.
It is recommend that if the Shared Drive is available you transfer your current active file to it to work on. This way you are leaving the original file untouched and safe in the event of a software/hardware failure. When you are finished and are happy with how your work saved on the Shared Drive you can then replace your original file with the updated version.
It is important that you get into the habit of verifying the integrity of any of your saved work. If you overwrite your old working copy with the new version that doesn't open then you will have lost all of your work.
Helpful Tips + Potential problems:
Get into the habit of using this space as a temporary work area. It is large enough for all but the biggest multimedia type applications that you will be creating. The only thing to remember is that it is a shared drive on the computer you are using so any material saved there will be accessible by the next person to log in. They will be able to open, modify and delete any files stored here, so keep this in mind if you are writing up assignments or personal information.
Also the Shared Drive is cleared once each day at 2:00am so if you working on the Shared Drive on one computer and come back the next day your work will not be there anymore. Also keep this in mind if you are working late in the computer labs.
Floppy Disk
The floppy disk drives are quickly becoming an outdated way of backing up and transferring your files. They only hold 1.4 Megabytes of data and are prone to failure. They are not recommended for working on open active files.
If you have a file on a floppy disk that you wish to modify, first make a copy of the file on the Shared Drive and modify that so if anything goes wrong your original copy is unaffected. When you have finished making changes to the version on the Zipshare, then copy the file back to the disk. This is the safest practice to adopt while using floppy discs and will result in your work being retrievable more often.
Helpful Tips + Potential problems:
Don't use the floppy disk as the primary area for working from. Make a copy of your work saved on the floppy disc somewhere more durable like your home drive or the Shared Drive and make your changes there. When you are finished you can copy over the original on the disc with your modified version.
For more information go to Caring for Floppy Disks
Cd Burners
All the GATCF computers come with CD Burner hardware/software. CD's are a cheap and relatively reliable way to make backup's of your work. You have 2 main options available to you: CD-R and CD-RW the only difference being you can only write to a CD-R once. New GATCF computers installed in BH149, WE024, A204, and Library in Townsville and the Library in Cairns include DVD burner drives.
A good practice to adopt is making regular backups onto CD of all the contents of your important documents, whether they are assignments you are writing reference documents you have spent hours locating and researching.
Use CD-R's when you want to make an unchangeable archive of your work. Label the CD with the date your performed the backup and put somewhere safe, if you get into the habit of doing this once a fortnight ( or once a week if the work is really important ) the cost of buying CD's over the time of your degree will pale beside the reassurance that you are protected from most mishaps.
Use CD-RW's for your day to day backup of work. These allow you to erase and rewrite up to about 1000 times. If you get into the habit of backing up regularly, when a problem does happen you are prepared for it and can recover more quickly than if you do not backup at all.
Helpful Tips + Potential problems:
You can only add files to a CD-R, any files on the disc cannot be changed.
The limit for CD-RW is about 1000 writes - if you use your disc for daily backups it should last about 3 years. However if you format the disc as a Direct CD so you can use it like a floppy disc and you work gets saved every 15 minutes or so your disc will last about 3-4 months. The convenience you get from Direct CD is weighted against the reliability of the contents.
For more information on creating CD's go to Windows CD Guide or Mac CD Guide
USB Drives
USB storage devices are usually key ring sized devices with storage spaces up to many Gigabytes but they are also available on many electronic devices such as mobile phones and MP3 players.
Because the GATCF cannot install drivers for every type of USB device some versions of USB devices may not work. Check before purchasing as IT&R have listed two brands: Sandisk Cruzer Micro and Seitec USB Bar as guaranteed to work on the JCU general access computers.
USB flash drives are recommended only for transporting documents between computers. They are usually too slow to use as a primary working area, and if not removed properly from a computer can cause the entire contents to become unusable. Use these when you already have a safe copy somewhere and you just want to move the file somewhere.
Helpful Tips + Potential problems:
These devices are stored using an electric charge and therefore quite fragile if you don't follow the instructions correctly. If you fail to disconnect one of these devices properly you can permanently erase the contents and make the device unusable. Always follow your operating systems rules for disconnecting a USB device or if you can't log in to disconnect the device, shutdown the computer and turn the power off.
For more information go to USB Flash Drives
Email Attachment
Another way of making sure a copy of your work is available if you are having issues with floppy disks, or CD's is to save it to the Shared Drive and attach it as an email to yourself. This way you can find a computer at home that can access the internet or another computer on campus. This method also has the advantage of storing multiple versions of the same file at varying stages of progress and being able to find them by the date the email was sent.
For more information go to Mirapoint Attachment Guide
Helpful Tips + Potential problems:
The thing to remember is that any mail you send or receive takes up quota on your JCU webmail account. Normally you can store up to 100MB of data, but this includes: Inbox, Sent Items, and Trash as well as folders that you create yourself. So if you send a 10MB file to yourself it takes up 10MB in your Sent Items and 10MB in your inbox when it arrives. Keep track of your quota usage and when it arrives in your inbox make sure you delete the email from your Sent Items folder.
Best Practices
The best habit you can get into when dealing with important data is to make backups. If you use the one disc over and over for all your work and that disc fails then you are left with nothing. If you use one disk for all your work and regularly make a backup onto another disc, or another computer then you are left with something that you can recover from.
This habit should scale with the importance of the contents of the disc. If you modify the files on the disc once a day then you should backup every 2-3 days. If you are working constantly on an assignment for 5-6 hours a day then you should backup every day.
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