Ways to back up projects:
- You can claim your free Dropbox account through your status as a CUNY student. You get up to 15GB of storage, which should be plenty of storage for this class and other classes (if you work with a lot of video files or other files that take up a lot of space, this might be a little dicey).
- You can get a free Google Account and use Google Drive. This also gives you 15GB in the free version.
- You can purchase an external hard drive or a flash drive. These will give you anywhere from 1GB to much larger. The less space, the cheaper, typically.
I cannot tell you how important it is to back up files. It might not be this semester, but at some point in your college career, something will go wrong. Your computer will crash, you accidentally delete the wrong file permanently, etc. Back up stuff regularly to help avoid losing some or all of your work.
A good practice, too, is to save different versions of files. For instance, using file naming logic like: “Rhetorical Analysis Draft 1” or “Rhetorical Analysis Draft 1 – 17 MAR 2021.” This helps you differentiate between different versions and gives you another chance to recover lost work if you have multiple versions of a file.
Before moving on, complete the following:
In a comment below, write about a time when you digitally “lost” something. For example, if you thought you saved a Microsoft Word document but you actually didn’t, if you accidentally closed out a browser window when you were in the middle of submitting something on it…anything like that.
If you have nothing, simply write, post a link to a music video that relates to theme of being really good at something or perfect…because I guess if you are lucky enough to not have a story like that you are just the Boss at not losing stuff!
After commenting below, click the button to continue:
One time I wrote an entire essay on Microsoft word, but this was the old Microsoft word and it didn’t have the features to save through the cloud, so it was only on the school computer. I wrote the essay saved it and closed out Word, when I went to find it, it wasn’t saved. So I had to re-write the entire essay, since then I was always much more careful.
– Daniel Ivezic
Every year, we had to get annual training completed. Then there was me, doing my annual training classes, I get called to talk to my supervisor about maintenance. When I returned, my session was timed out, and I lost about 20-30 minutes of progress. It was rough.
For the Introduction assignment I was going to use a picture I had saved in my files in the past but after looking for it I couldn’t find it. Apparently it got lost so I had to go through my photo album on my phone and email the picture to myself so I could use it.
My last semester at BMCC, I had to write a final outline of a whole book chapter by chapter for my Business Organization class and I accidently deleted the tab which closed and deleted everything because I was so anxious to submit it and be done with the semester. Thank god I sent my friend a copy earlier for revision that saved me from failing.
I have lost more things than I can count or remember. Most recently, my friends and I hoped to recover an old fiction piece we wrote together in middle school, but unfortunately discovered the site we used is now defunct and all our surely stunning middle-school musings were lost with the site.
I had a USB flash drive that I stored a lot of music on but one day it got corrupted and I can no longer access anything on there. It had a lot of rarer old releases from artists too so I was really bummed when it happened.
The technology I owned when I was younger was not very good at all, so crashes were almost a daily occurrence. This obviously was eventually going to cause a problem, as one day after finishing some work for a class, the entire laptop died on me. I had not manually saved and nothing had auto-saved, so I ended up having to redo everything. Nowadays, things like google drive and its occasional saves ensure that I have backups for the work I do.
When it comes to files for school google drive normally has enough space for everything. Im sure many of you have run out of storage on your phone before because of photos. I always used to have to delete photos to free up space until I started using google photos. This app uploads the pictures from my camera roll and stores them in the cloud so I can always access them but also free up space on my phone.
For my internship with the JFK Redevelopment team over the last summer, I had to hand in a report on my last day of the internship along with a PowerPoint presentation. I did not save my finalized presentation on my remote desktop for work, so I thought it did not save after I completed it 2am that same morning. After doing some digging and crying for like five minutes, I realized the finalized presentation was on my regular PC drive.
I wrote out an essay I 12th grade English in word and i accidently forgot to save and had to rewrite the essay.
Similar to a lot of people I had the classic forget to save on the old version of Microsoft Word and lose an essay you spent hours working on happen to me. Only difference was I was too frustrated to take the time to rewrite my essay.
I lost my resume on Microsoft Word because I never saved it once!! Not even a name ???????? 2 hours wasted.
The last time I’ve lost my writing due to forgetting to save, it was in the 5th grade for an English assignment. Ever since then, I’ve been following a personal rule of saving my work every 10 minutes. This hasn’t been a problem since I started using Google Docs though.
Posting on Eman’s behalf: – One time I was doing a homework assignment for my History teacher and since I was using Microsoft word offline, I thought it would save automatically and it didn’t. So, I had to redo the assignment.
One time I while working on an assignment my computer had ran out of battery and I completely forgot. That caused me to lose my progress on the assignment in was working on. Now I make sure I save my work and that my computer has enough battery.
I was doing an online test for my math class and accidentally refreshed the page while I was nearly done with it and had to redo my work
Posting on Sofy’s behalf: I have written a 9 page essay that I was extremely proud of and my MacBook crashed and deleted my whole essay. I cried for like 2 hours while I tried to rewrite my essay, which wasn’t nearly as spectacular as the one I had originally. It was very, very sad.
I remember one time when I was writing an essay, my laptop shut down due to no battery. Turns out I forgot to click save as and the file was lost. Luckily I didn’t write that much so it wasn’t that bad.
When I was taking my AP exam last year online, my laptop would always lag and slow down from open multiple tabs. I feel that I lost some time for my exam just waiting for my laptop to load.
One time i during the 5th grade I was typing my science fair project when suddenly I lost power to my computer 3 pages of work gone. ever since then I started saving after every paragraph.