Posted by Martino Britt

I would like to offer a small piece of advice to anyone who is willing to listen. The advice is small, but the results can be immeasurable. While technology has grown tremendously over the past few years, there is still only so much for which we can rely on technology. That being said, let me tell you how important it is to save your work in more than one place.

With flash drives and portable hard drives at our disposal, we might think that we have all of our work backed up safely. That could not be further from the truth. I have had two incidents involving missing or corrupted jump drives that have caused me to lose work.

The first incident occurred back in January. I was leaving the library in a hurry, and I forgot to extract my jump drive and take it with me. That was catastrophic because it was about a week before my final project was due for a class. It is very hard to redo an assignment you have lost when you do not have the hard copies of the work you have already put into it.

My second incident with jump drives occurred just recently during Fall I, when my laptop was diagnosed with a fried motherboard. Luckily, after the first incident, I decided to save all of my work on my laptop and on a jump drive, so I thought I had a fail-proof plan. In the final few days before my final paper was due, I started having issues with my jump drive. Whenever I plugged it into a PC, it would not connect, and I no longer had access to any of the files on the jump drive. I ended up rushing through a final paper that I was not completely satisfied with – but some grade beats no grade, if you ask me. I took the jump drive to a store, and they wanted $249.00 just to see if they could recover anything, with no guarantees. I think that is a lot of money to spend without a 100% guarantee.

So, now I have come up with a new plan. I save my work on my laptop, I save my work on a portable hard drive, I save my work on a jump drive, and I email it to myself. I offer this piece of advice so that people do not have to experience what I did. I ended up losing a lot of work that, in my opinion, was priceless because it was the details of my journey through school. Now that I have had two bad experiences with jump drives, I will be taking more extreme measures to safeguard my work. I wanted to share my experience with others so that they do not have to experience the same disappointment that I have experienced twice.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kodomut/3666786469/