Saving and Backing Up Your Work
During the last year, as students come to rely more on using their own laptops for their work, we've had a number of cases where they have frozen or crashed and important pieces of work have been lost. It's also been the case where temporary files can't be found and recovery tools haven't recovered anything. Backing up your work is a tedious and not very exciting thing to do but you suddenly wish you'd done it if you are faced with losing a 300-page document or you've been working on something for weeks or months.
The first thing to say is that if you nee any assistance with setting up OneDrive, or have any questions, please ask one of the Computer Officers at Law and they will be glad to help.
If you take the time to set up a few things at the start of your studying, it will reduce the chances of losing work and quite a lot of backing up will happen automatically. Here are a few tips to help:
Set up OneDrive
Every student has a University account and is allocated a Microft Office 365 licence. This gives you access to a suite of Microsoft Office applications. Even if you are not a fan of Microsoft and use different applications for mail or word processing for example, the OneDrive storage gives you cloud storage space for backup and the ability to autosave your documents (if you use Microsoft applications).
In addition, if you store your files on OneDrive, you can access them from other devices such as a tablet or your mobile phone.
Using OneDrive
You are allocated one Terabyte (1 TB) of storage for your personal data, which should be plenty of space. You can read and set up OneDrive by using this link. Once it's set up you'll see an icon of a blue cloud on your taskbar like this (on a Windows machine):
On a Mac, you should see it at the top of the screen. If you can't see the icon, it may be in the tray, which you can expand by clicking on the arrow to the left of the icon in the picture. Clicking on the icon brings up a window which has a cog at the top-right to access its settings. Clicking on this brings up a window that allows you to configure OneDrive:
Press the 'Manage Backup' button and another window appears allowing you to back up folders. Select at least 'Documents' and 'Desktop' and press the 'Save Changes' button.
This will now synchronise your Documents folder and Desktop with OneDrive so any files you create and change here will be backed up automatically. Note that it is a synchronisation operation so if you delete files from thse folders, they will also be deleted from OneDrive.
Saving Documents
If you use Microsoft Office applications such as Word or Excel, when you save them to OneDrive, you will see a toggle switch in the title bar of the application:
If it shows 'On', your documents will be saved periodically, in the background, so you won't notice it. If it shows 'Off', click to switch it on and it will ask you for a OneDrive location to store it. Once it's set to 'On', you shouldn't have to worry about it if your laptop freezes or crashes or runs out of battery. You might only lose the changes you made since the last AutoSave, rather than lose or corrupt the whole document.
If you use applications other than Microsoft, they may not have AutoSave functionality so you'll have to save them manually, but if you save them to the folders that you set up in OneDrive settings (Documents and Desktop), they will be synchronised with OneDrive periodically.
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- OneDrive settings
- OneDrive icon in taskbar
- Setting up documents and desktop to sync
- How autosave works
- Mac considerations