Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Accidents can happen: your work could be lost or your files damaged in many ways, and usually it seems to be at the most inconvenient moment!

Backing up your documents

If you are lucky, the document might be one you can replace, or you may be able to accept the loss as a cautionary lesson to guard against worse things in future.

Staff and students are ultimately responsible for backing up their own work, and it pays to get into the habit of duplicating your files. Copy them to more than one location.

For example, you could send documents as attachments to your own email account for later download, or better, read our instructions about how you can save your work to other media.

If you are working on a larger document, make incremental backups. Go to "File" -> "Save As..." and append a version number to rename your document; for example myfile-1.doc, myfile-2.doc, myfile-3.doc and so on.

At the end of the year, your existing undergraduate desktop and documents are removed and a new home directory will be created when you enrol next year. Make a backup of the Documents and Desktop folders, and any files you want to keep in your home directory. You can copy them to a USB drive, CD-ROM or DVD, as you prefer, and restore them to your Arts computer account next year.