Minding your data

There is a famous joke in Ireland. Whenever a child does not have their homework done, they claim that “the dog ate it”. This is universally considered to be an invalid excuse!

For a computer student to say their hard disk crashed and that they lost their work, is even worse. Hard disk failure is inevitable, given your specialty, you are supposed to know how to handle data and ensure that a predictable event does not result in loss.

The Institute provides access to One Drive. Before you begin to do any course work, read the guidance from Computer Services on how to use this. Then read Microsoft’s own guidelines, so you know how to recover accidentally deleted files, etc.

Save all course work to this drive, you can also keep ISO files, manuals etc. here. You can also access this information over the Internet and from home.

Do NOT save VMs to the O:\ drive. As a computer student, you should know how to recreate any VM which fails, reasonably quickly.

A last word: we have verified with several veterinary surgeons, dogs do not generally eat USB drives or external SSDs, don't even think about using that excuse!