Contact Information
| Location: | Fenwick Hall, Lower Level, Room 021 |
| Hours: | 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM Monday through Friday |
| Email: | helpdesk@holycross.edu |
| Phone: | 508-793-3548 |
| Fax: | 508-793-2711 |
Saving Documents Best Practices
Whenever possible, documents should be saved onto your personal network drive (P drive). Each student has a personal network drive (P drive) which no one else can gain access to. Network drives are backed up nightly and we can recover documents that may be damaged or inadvertently lost. The network is always the best bet when saving important documents. If you are not connected to the Holy Cross Novell network there are some other ways to save documents:
§ They can be saved to the hard drive (C drive) of personal computers, although we do not recommend this, as the files cannot be recovered if lost. NOTE: Do not save documents on the hard drives of lab computers as they are periodically "wiped" clean and all information will be lost. Also remember, when saving documents to your hard drive there is the possibility that your hard drive will crash and all information could be lost. This is not a common occurrence but it has been known to happen.
§ They can be e-mailed; this is a much better choice than saving to your hard drive. You can e-mail the document to yourself as an attachment to your Holy Cross e-mail account or an off-campus e-mail account.
§ USB Thumb Drives or Flash Drives are another way to save your work. 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).
§ They can be saved to a floppy diskette. Keep in mind whenever you use a floppy diskette that they can be damaged very easily. For example by being placed next to magnets and heat, being left in the sun, or being placed loose in bags or backpacks can cause damage. If you are going to use floppies they should always be kept in a protective case or holder.
§ Net Storage is another way to access your P drive when off-campus. Click on the Log In button on the Holy Cross home page and then select My Network Files/ Net Storage. You should see Drive P@ your user name ( that is your P drive, even though it looks completely different from the way it would look when you are logged into the network from your computer at school. ) To save a document using Net Storage, you would save it to the computer’s hard drive first. Then go to the Holy Cross web site, click Log In, then click on My Network Files, and double click on the folder next to your name. Select File, Upload, and browse to the saved file to attach it and send it up to the site.
What can you do if a file stored on your P drive is lost?
- If you have successfully saved a document to your P drive and it is suddenly gone, you can request to have a file restored. In order to do this, you must remember not only the name of the file, but the folders in which is was located in. So if you had an English Work folder on your P drive, and you saved a document to this folder, you would need to state the Folder name: English Work and the document name. You may then call the Help Desk and request a file restoration and state when you last saw the file on your P drive. We willl then initiate the file restoration with our network group. You will receive an email when this has been done successfully.
We hope that you find this information useful and will gladly answer any questions that you may have about saving documents to prevent possible loss. Our office hours are Monday through Friday 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Please feel free to contact us using the information below.