Your Home Drive & Saving Your Work
When working on documents you should regularly save your work as you go along. On College PC’s you have a choice of saving to your own personal network space (H-drive) or using removable storage.
H-Drive (home drive)
All College students are provided with an allocation of network file storage which shows as the H-drive on the College PCs. This space is secure and regularly backed up, and is the recommended place to store your data. Any data lost from your H-drive can be restored from backup – the RM-CMIS Helpdesk will be able to assist with this. To see the contents of your H-drive, double-click on the “My Computer” icon on the desktop and you’ll see your H-drive listed.
Removable Storage
Removable storage is useful if you work on a College PC and then want to continue the same work on another College PC or a computer outwith College.
USB Flash Drives: All College PCs have USB ports which these devices can be plugged into. Once connected it will be listed in “My Computer” – you can then save files to it or work on files already stored on it. These devices are generally reliable but data corruption can occur, often resulting in files being lost. Anything that you save on a USB flash drive should also be backed up onto your H:drive.
CD/DVDs:
All College PC’s offer the ability to save files to CD or DVD. Disks can be recordable where you can only add files once or re-writable where you can add files to it at other times.
Storing Files On The C-Drive
The C-drive is the hard disk drive of the machine you are working on. You should never store your work on the C-drive because the PC’s are regularly rebuilt and your files are likely to be lost.
Laptops
If you are working on a College issue laptop you should regularly back-up your files to a USB flash drive and then transfer these to your H-Drive from a College PC. If the hard drive on the laptop fails, you may lose your files unless you have backed them up to an alternative location.