Backing up digital communications, data and other electronic files is an essential practice to ensure against the loss of valuable information. The purpose of performing back-ups is to be able to restore a system to a known state (as of the date of the most recent back-up) in case of system failure, or to restore individual files inadvertently deleted, inappropriately modified, corrupted or lost. The responsibility for backing up all data, software and programs on any student laptop computer rests with the computer user or owner.
If you bring your laptop to the CCIT Support Center, it is imperative that your data already be backed up before having any work performed on your laptop. It is our goal to protect your data while we repair your laptop but due to hardware failures and data corruption we cannot guarantee the safety of your data and we will not backup your data prior to working on your laptop.
Use the following link to find out more information about backing up your data:
http://www.clemson.edu/ccit/backup
NEVER KEEP ONLY ONE COPY OF ANYTHING CRITICAL!!!
We recommend that you keep multiple copies of your most critical data including your e-portfolio data, academic data, thesis, resume, etc. You may also want to keep back-up copies of your pictures, music and videos if they are important to you!
We recommend that you keep copies of your most critical data:
- on CD/DVDs at home or in a friend's room
- on your parent's computer or your roommate's computer
- emailed to your parents or a friend
Where is my data?
If you have one of the Clemson recommended laptops with the software image, the default locations are:
My Documents - d:\profile.cu\my documents
Outlook data - d:\profile.cu\application data\microsoft\outlook
Desktop - d:\profile.cu\desktop
Favorites - d:\profile.cu\favorites (your favorites in Internet Explorer
If you have some other kind of laptop, default locations depend on how your laptop is set up. Generally My documents is under c:\documents and settings\YOUR WINDOWS USER NAME\my documents, Outlook is c:\documents and settings\Your Windows User Name\application data\microsoft\outlook.
One thing that makes it a little difficult to back up is the fact that My Documents includes folders My Music and My Pictures. Some students keep large volumes of data in those two folders. So if you are burning a CD and want only your academic data, you might need to exclude those folders so the data will fit on one CD or DVD. You might need multiple CD/DVDs if you want to back up those folders.