Avoid extra stress at this time of year by following these hints and tips about safely saving your work.

Two doubles and a single

Double check where you’re saving your work to, don’t just trust in the quick save icon.  You’ve spent a great deal of time and taken great care in creating your work, make sure you’re 100% certain it’s saving where you want it to.

You also need to double save your work. You never know when your old faithful pen drive will give up the ghost so back up your work by saving it to your student drive.

If you always follow the two points above, it should mean you only have to do your piece of work once. Otherwise you could be faced with spending a great deal of time trying to find lost work and still having to re-write an assignment or dissertation.

Email

A good way of making sure you have work available to you wherever you are is to send it to yourself as an attachment via email.  However, before you start working on it you must save it to your pen drive and/or student drive.  If you don’t, your document will go into a temporary file which will most likely be deleted once you log off and power down a university pc.

Three steps to tracking down your files

Try the following ways to find your lost files:

Unexpected power loss or pc shut down? Open up the program you were working in and click ‘File’ then ‘Recent’ (this may automatically open for you).  If your file doesn’t appear then you can click on ‘recover unsaved documents’ from within that screen.

Set the PC to work for you by setting up a search for your file:  Click ‘start’, select ‘computer’ and type some or all of the file name into the search box at the top right hand side of the screen.

Missing work opened from an email?  Check the downloads folder of your pc.

Always here to help

You can find support on using Microsoft Office packages and further general tips here: http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/ls/it-help/guides/

If you are in one of our buildings and cannot locate your document, visit your nearest help desk and our staff will try their best to retrieve and recover your work.