How often should I back-up my college flash-drive?

Fubear

How often should I back-up my flash drive I have dedicated to my college work?

It has a bunch of work, all of the downloads from the course websites and some solution manuals to help with the online assignments.

BoomShake

A flash drive should never hold the only copy of anything. Back up everything, every day, whenever you're back at your room.

Lewisham

Yeah, I've had students in tears because they lost their flash drive or the volume got corrupted. They lost everything. They never considered it would be a problem, and the convenience of being able to work at home and on lab computers seduced them.

As an instructor, there is nothing you can do but say "I'm sorry for you" and give them a fail. Don't be that person.

Back up every day.

soxbox

Simple solution is to grab a gmail account and email everything to yourself - that also helps in that then you'll then have older versions of the same document if you trawl back through your mail.

Best solution is to use some form of version control system and constantly sync with that, but that requires a bit of technical know-how (unless there's a cloud-based version control system I don't know about).

Hahnsoo1

When I was going through undergrad, I kept one copy on a burned CD-Rom, one copy on a remote FTP server, and one copy on my laptop. I kept it in a single work folder that I could easily transfer/burn, and I made sure I backed up whenever I finished some classwork at a significant point (first draft of a paper, projects that were near completion, etc.). It takes less than 15 minutes, and it's saved my butt more than a dozen times. I highly recommend backing up often and in multiple locations.

DragonPup

Strongly consider off site backup in addition to your normal back up if god forbid your room catches of fire, or your stuff gets stolen. Like soxbox mentioned, you can gmail stuff to yourself for a cheap way of doing it.

Shorn Scrotum Man

I try to keep my USB drive sinc'd regularly with DropBox. That way I have a copy on my flashdrive, a copy on all my machines I use DropBox on, and on their remote servers. And all it takes is a quick drag and drop.

cooljammer00

My school gave out USB drives on the first day, but they also offered a back up server that no one ever used.

Lewisham

Shorn Scrotum Man wrote: »

I try to keep my USB drive sinc'd regularly with DropBox. That way I have a copy on my flashdrive, a copy on all my machines I use DropBox on, and on their remote servers. And all it takes is a quick drag and drop.

Dropbox is an excellent way of performing automated off-site backups. I have my main Documents folder in my Dropbox, and it is awesome.

Ganluan

If you think USB is bad, imagine students keeping critical files on a floppy. I had one student come in who had lost almost all of their thesis because it had been stored on a couple floppy disks.

illig

Ganluan wrote: »

If you think USB is bad, imagine students keeping critical files on a floppy. I had one student come in who had lost almost all of their thesis because it had been stored on a couple floppy disks.

what's a floppy? :P

seriously though: OP, keep in mind that flash drives use the absolute cheapest flash memory chips, that's how they are so affordable.

always back up the flash drive locally (on your PC) and off-site (via gmail, or some other file storage utility).

i've had friends religiously backup their flash drives to their laptops... only to have the laptop hard drive crash, or worse, the machine be stolen, making their backups nill

Captain Vash

just a little shout out.

if you have comcast internet, you automatically get 2gb free online storage with that.

look into it.