By Marina Stuart
Staff Writer
At SLA, laptops are used as textbooks, resources, media outlets, and of course, a means of saving school files. However, these computers are used more than five days a week, for seven months, occasionally they break, or crash, or something is lost. Almost every student has had something bad happen to their computer. It is times like these when it is a good idea to have your files backed up somehow.
As a Freshman, you would hear this advice given by the Tech Teacher Ms. Hull, and teachers in other classes. However,only about a third of students actually back up their files — and they often pay the price. SLAMedia wants you to know that backing up your files is essential, and there is more than one way to do it.
1. Use an external hard drive. An external hard drive is like a giant usb drive, that can hold lots of word documents, music, or movies. Many people use external hard drives as a way to store documents when their computer are too full and they won’t lose everything. Senior Maxime Damis uses an external hard drive and says “I decided to use a 500 GB external, because i found it online and it was portable so it made sharing documents so much easier.”
One problem with an external hard drive is that sometimes they also break and you could lose all your work again. This all could also be done with just a large USB drive. In addition to the external hard drive, you can use time machine. Time machine is on every Mac computer. Every time you plug in your external hard drive, it automatically syncs all of your work to the hard drive without you doing anything.
2. Use Dropbox. Dropbox is a online area where you can store up to 2 GB of work, for free. It is a downloadable folder that you can save anything to, and can access online if your computer crashes. It is one of the most common ways that people save files at SLA. Many students and teachers use dropbox.
3. Invest in media. This is the simple, not so efficient but productive way of saving your work. Use the media (ex. Facebook, Google Docs, YouTube, Flickr) as a way to save your work in a place where you can access it from anywhere, and if your computer crashes at least it is somewhere. However, the downside is that it is all public and often you can edit it easily. Also, you need to have an internet connection at all times and some of the websites are not available in school.
These ways will help anyone avoid the horror of losing all their schoolwork when their computer crashes. Computer crashes can happen to anyone, even freshmen with their new computers, though most commonly to juniors and seniors, whose computers are very old and slow.
In summation, back up your work. It’s not that hard.
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