Copy Craziness

In the world today, everything is becoming digital. Paper is being used less often, and nearly everything is being put into a digital format.

This raises a hypothetical concern: what happens when your computer crashes about 10 minutes after you finished your 7-page paper and it’s due in about an hour? You saved your paper but you only had a single copy of it and now you can’t access it to print it for class.

This is why file saving is important. Not just hitting the little floppy-disk icon at the top of the menu bar, but also saving your files in multiple locations. This can be applied not only to class assignments, but also music, Kindle books, and files you work on for a future employer. You don’t want to stay up until 2am working on a big presentation, waking up a few hours later to realize that your hard work is gone and unrecoverable.

These worst-case scenarios are why you should invest your time in getting to know multiple online and offline storage systems. There are many different options for many different tastes, but to name a few:

1)            USB storage: I personally have 3 8GB USB storage devices. I tend to misplace them easily, so I’ve started to switch to online storage, although multiple USB’s aren’t a bad idea

2)            iCloud storage: I use this to store my iTunes library. When my old laptop crashed, this is how I got all of my books, music, movies, and TV shows back. It relieved a lot of stress, and it automatically saves your purchases once you buy them so that if you need to recover them, you can do it through iTunes.

3)            Dropbox: This one is by far my favorite. Before Dropbox, I used to wait ages for the ITaP computers to read my USB’s and wasted a lot of time that could’ve been spent doing homework. Since Dropbox is Internet storage, it loads much faster and allows for faster printing of what I need. You also get 2GB of free storage, and can easily increase this capacity by doing simple tasks such as “Liking” Dropbox on Facebook and referring your friends. 2GB might not seem like that much, but documents don’t take up that much space.

4)            Email: This one is a nice little hack. You can send yourself emails with your documents attached to them. You can then just keep these files in your inbox should something happen to your computer. They’d still be there since your email can be logged into from virtually anywhere.

It may seem a bit trivial to keep about 2-5 copies of each file, but it can be extremely helpful. Save your files in multiple locations only when you’re completely finished, making sure that if you need to update them, you do it in each location. You can never be over-prepared, but you can always count on something going wrong, especially when you pull an all-nighter to get your work done.