Making regular backups of your work is the most important thing you can do to protect your data. We provide recommendations for students, faculty, and administrative staff below:
Backing up your work provides insurance that you will be able to restore your work from a backup copy if the original is lost due to theft, accident, hardware failure, software bugs, or a computer virus. Your only hope of protection is a good backup!
At a minimum, you should backup your most important work and other files that would be difficult to replace (e.g., thesis, final papers, research data, address books, etc). You may also want to backup serial numbers and license codes for personal software, as well as preference files for specific software. If these files are backed up, reinstallation of your operating system and software will be much easier.
Mac and Windows computers store data for each user account in a specific folder. This includes files saved to the desktop, your documents folder, as well as some software preferences. Backing up this folder will preserve much of your user data.
You should backup often enough that a hard drive crash wouldn't be a disaster. Once a week is a common choice, but pick what is right for you. The most important thing is to make it a regular habit, since you can't predict when something will go wrong.
If you have questions about backing up your data, contact IT Services.
Reading Area Community College
Ten South Second Street, P.O. Box 1706
Reading, PA 19603-1706, 610-372-4721 or 800-626-1665
Accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education
3624 Market Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-2680, 215.662.5606