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Don't Lose Your Thesis

Every year we see students lose theses, finals, and special papers only to start all over again. The following are some steps that can be taken to prevent such losses.

• Save your documents to your P:\ drive  This area is backed up nightly.   To save a file to your P drive, go to File, Save As, and click on the drop down button, to navigate to your P drive which should show it as Drive P @ your user name and the letter P at the end of the drive name.  REMINDER !  - you must be logged into the network to save to your P drive !!!
• Saving to your P drive from off-campus  Go to the Holy Cross web site, click on the LOG IN button.  Click on  My Network Files -Network Storage.  Now log into it by typing your user name and password .  You will then see Drive P @ and your user name then the letter  P   You do not need to go in any further unless you wish to save it into a specific folder.  Double click on the folder next to your name and it will open up your files.  Be careful to save a document first to your computer’s hard drive or desktop before attempting to save it into Net Storage.  Once you have saved it to your hard drive, click on File, Upload, and then select the file you want to save by  browsing  to select it and click submit.
• Save a second copy to a floppy disk  Make sure your disk is in good condition. Purchase a new disk at least every semester. Carry your diskettes in a plastic disk case. Diskettes can be easily destroyed when they are carried in book bags with no protection.   Floppy disks are more prone to break than are USB Flash Drives, please read below.
• USB Thumb Drives or Flash Drives  Insert the flash drive into a USB port on your computer and then click on the drive when it appears on the task bar, or double click My Computer and locate the drive in the list of Removable Disks.  It may appear as an E drive or any other letter that your computer wants to assign it- depending on how many other drives you have attached.  ( Please note, if you are logged into the network, then you will probably see your P drive listed as one of your Network Drives).
  
•  Turn on Auto-Save. Microsoft Word has an auto-save feature.  To verify, open Word, click Tools, Options, and Save. Set the Save Auto-Recovery to 5 or 10 minutes.

If you have lost a document here are some steps that you can do to try and recover it.

• In Windows XP, under C:\Windows\Temp is where temporary files are kept, unless you delete them. Sort these files by the Modification date. Open the temp files that show about when you were working on your document. These files can be opened in Word. When these files are opened, you will see a lot of what looks like garbage. Scroll through to the end. There may be some salvageable text, which can be cut and copied to another document.
• If you have any printed text, they can be OCR scanned. Saves a lot of tying!  Stop in at the Help Desk and ask for instructions on how to use the scanner.
• For floppy disks use Norton Disk Doctor to fix errors. Errors maybe recoverable. If you don't have Norton Disk Doctor, bring your disk to the Help Desk.
• Open your document in a text editor like Notepad. You will need to remove the formatting that looks like garbage characters. Then cut and copy your text into a new document. If you use the Notepad or any text editor, you will need to reformat your document. You will lose bolding, italic, underlining, etc. any special formatting.
• If your computer locks up, your system is frozen with the document on the screen, turn your computer completely off at the power button, providing you have auto-save turned on.  When you turn the machine off auto-save will automatically Recover your document the next time you open Word.  In which case you should re-save your document.  You will lose any text that was typed between the last saving time and when your computer froze.

If you have problems or have questions, please call, e-mail or stop by the Help Desk, Fenwick B-21.