Backing Up Your Work

Every teacher of this course has heard “my laptop died” in the last week of a project. It is always true, and it is never a reason anyone can do anything about afterwards. Ten minutes of setup makes it a shrug instead.

The rule professionals use

Three copies, on two kinds of media, one of them somewhere else.

For your work that means, concretely:

1. The copy you are typing on.
2. A copy that syncs automatically — your school or personal cloud folder — so that a save is a backup.
3. A copy that is not connected to your machine at all: a USB drive in a drawer, updated at the end of each unit.

The third one is the odd one out on purpose. Anything connected can be damaged by the same event: ransomware encrypts the synced folder too, and a mistaken delete syncs cheerfully to the cloud. A drive in a drawer is immune to both.

The end-of-unit routine, in four minutes

1. Close your editor, so nothing is half-written.
2. Copy the whole ICS3U folder to the USB drive. The whole folder — not the file you think matters.
3. Rename that copy on the drive to something like ICS3U — end of Unit 2. This is an archive: a snapshot you do not intend to change again, kept so you can go back to a version that worked.
4. Eject the drive properly, and put it somewhere that is not your backpack.

Backups and archives are different jobs. A backup answers “my machine is gone”. An archive answers “it worked on Tuesday and I have broken it since” — which is the more common emergency, and the one a synced folder alone will not save you from, because it has faithfully synced your mistake.

A copy you have never restored is not a backup

Once, before you need it: open the backup on a different machine and run the program from there. People discover on the worst day that they backed up a shortcut, an empty folder, or a file the other machine cannot open.

The habit is assessed, not just recommended: the culminating project asks where your backup is, and The Toolbox expects the whole folder kept somewhere that is not the machine you type on.

Curriculum connection

C2.3

use standard procedures to back up and archive user files.

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C2.2

describe procedures to safeguard data and programs from malware (e.g., viruses, Trojan horses, worms, spyware, adware, malevolent macros), and devise a thorough system protection plan;

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