Design Integration Laboratory

Architecture 222, 410/510, & 610

Backing Up Your Work

Overview

Backing up your work is an essential part of working successfully with computers. Things do go wrong -- your job is to develop airtight working habits so that when things go wrong, you don't loose your work as a result.

One of the challenges of using good back-up procedures is that things don't go wrong all the time -- only when you're least ready for it (or so it seems). So, if you wait for the computer to teach you the importance of this, it will almost always be a painful lesson. Much better to develop good backup habits for their own sake, so when the lesson comes, you're all ready for it.

Without good backups, your work is vvery vulnerable. With good backups, your work can be much more secure than, for instance, a sheet of drawings on paper, since any one copy of your work can be destroyed without destroying your work itself.

Good backup habits protect you against a wide range of possible pitfalls, including computer crashes while you're working, disk crashes while you're not working, natural disasters, like a rain-drenched backpack, and anthropogenic disasters, like a stolen backpack.

Save Early and Save Often

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Keep Versions of work in progress

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Avoid working off a floppy disk or the desktop

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Store work on two different media

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Store work in two different places

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© 1996 Kevin Matthews, All Rights Reserved.

http://www.dil.uoregon.edu/courses/96.4/a222.f96/a222.f96.backups.html - Posted 95.10.01 KMM, rev. 96.10.08