Saving, Backups, and File Versions

Every year, students lose essays, dissertations, presentations and other work because they save to the wrong place, rely on one copy, or do not know how to recover an earlier version.

Good saving habits reduce stress, protect your work, and help you avoid last-minute problems.

Watch out for these common problems when saving and backing up your work.

• Saving to the desktop on campus computers. Files are deleted when you log off.
• Relying only on a USB drive. USBs are easily lost, damaged, or corrupted.
• Not understanding AutoSave. You may work with it off, or not realise it saves automatically.
• Not using OneDrive properly. You may work on local copies instead of cloud-synced files.
• Not knowing about version history. This makes it harder to recover an earlier version if something goes wrong.

Check that:

• your file is saved in OneDrive
• AutoSave is turned on where available
• OneDrive is syncing properly
• you know how to check version history if needed
• you are not relying on a USB drive as your only copy
• you are not saving work to the desktop on a campus computer