A few months ago, Melissa Jenks pulled an all-nighter on a library computer to finish a 25-page paper, and she e-mailed it to herself as an attachment. The next day, while continuing to revise the paper, Jenks made a fatal error: She never saved the attachment to her computer. "Every time I clicked save, it saved somewhere, but where I will never know," she says.
As a result, Jenks lots a full day's work and spent the next day rewriting a paper that she had already perfected. To help others avoid that fate, gradPSYCH asked information-technology experts the best ways to safeguard your hard work and valuable time.
Tip 1: Back up to several places
When you save a document, record the data on two physical locations, such as your laptop's hard drive, a shared (university network) drive or a USB port, says Ben Marsden, director of Systems and Networks at Smith College. That way, if you drop or drown your laptop, your paper isn't gone.
Tip 2: Don't rely on e-mail.
As Jenks learned, e-mail should never be used a storage medium. "E-mail is volatile and quite often doesn't store attachments," Marsden says.
Tip 3: Create multiple versions.
Every time you make significant changes to a document, save it as a new version--either by using a new file name, like "thesis v.3"--or by accessing the "versioning" function in your word-possessing software. "In case your file becomes corrupt, you can go back to earlier versions instead of continually saving to the corrupt file," he says.
Tip 4: Save early and often.
Take advantage of your word processor's "auto save" function, and note where it's saving the file, says Marsden. In MS Word, you can adjust where and when the software backs up your document by going to the "Tools" menu, clicking on "Options," and then the "Save" tab. Word should save your document every two minutes at least, he notes.
Tip 5: Plan for posterity.
Even after your have a doctorate in hand, you may want to find an old study reference or idea. That's why it's a good idea to occasionally back up all the data on your computer to an external hard drive, says Allison Graham, a clinical psychology doctoral student with the Virginia Consortium Program. That strategy proved to be useful when, a few months ago, Graham's laptop crashed. "If I hadn't backed up my files, I may have lost everything that I've worked on in my master's program and my doctoral program," she says.