Backing Up To Mitigate File Corruption and Data Loss

Occasionally, students are unable to submit assignments citing corrupted files, away from their desktop, lost flash drives etc.  We pprobably receive, on average, 1-2 such emails each month.

As the programme is offered at below cost and the terms and conditions are predicated on on-time submissions for batch marking, a lost or corrupted file can’t be accepted as a reason for missing a deadline.

Ensuring the availability and integrity of your submission are key elements of information security resilience and to this end one or more of the following risk mitigation options should be considered:

1. Each time you work on your assignment email it to yourself afterwards.  This way, you will always have a version of the assignment in your webmail account.
2. Each time you work on your assignment save a back-up copy (each time you save use a different filename) to a Cloud account such as OneDrive, Box, DropBox, iCloud etc.  There are also subscription services such as iDrive that back-up your data in real time in the background.
3. Copy to external storage media.  You can then keep this in a place separate to the laptop, e.g. relative’s house, work, car etc.

Most important point: Create a back-up copy each time you work on the assignment and save it online or email it to yourself.

All of the above considered, if you have recently purchased a system and it is linked to a MS Office/OneDrive account you may find that your C: drive is automatically linked to the Cloud and incremental back-ups are saved automatically.