Backups and Archiving

Every semester, at least 3 students are literally reduced to tears when months of work becomes lost, corrupted, or somehow permanently unavailable. These cases are even more painful when the person did take some steps to backup and archive their work, but the archive itself is corrupted. It is not difficult to integrate backups into your workflow and the payoff is priceless.

The responsibility and the strategy both are your responsibility. The GSD has made publically available numerous options, including zip drives, cd writers, and network storage devices. Use them.

Optical Disk

Computer Resources does not recommend zip disks because of their unreliable track record. We do recommend that you burn a labeled and dated CD or DVD at every project milestone, then store them in different places. Why so many? In order to make CD/DVD writable media, the surface that gets written on needs to be a little soft in order to burn the data onto it (in contrast to the commercial CD/DVD made from a glass master mold), and that surface is easily scratched. A CD/DVD can also get lost or stolen. But as backups go, they're one of the easiest, most reliable things available, and relatively inexpensive. Discs are available from the vending machine on the 5th floor or many 3rd party retailers.

USB Memory Key

Another very good device for backup purposes is a Memory Key. They are inexpensive and easy to handle. Memory Keys are plug and play devices that can be used on Mac and PC platform interchangeably. Size of Memory Keys range, but something like 512 MB or 1 GB should be sufficient. They are very useful when working on multiple computers. You can use them to carry your files between computers and at the same time have a most recent copy of your work backed up. USB keys are available from the vending machine on the 5th floor.

Network Storage

Your home account is networked and available from anywhere on the internet, and the disc on which it lives is much less likely to fail than your internal local hard drive, which can be exposed to electromagnetic fluctuations, spilled coffee, and any number of other hazards associated with life on the trays.

However, if you accidentally delete a file from your home account or other network storage area, there is no chance of recovery. Without exception, every user is responsible for backing up their own work.

The GSD maintains many network storage areas, including every users' home account, in a temperature controlled, RAID protected environment that gets regularly backed up to tape and stored offsite.

Computer Resources restores files from tape only in the event of a system wide emergency.