GATCF – Tips for saving your work

When typing up an assignment, you need to make sure that your hard work is safe! The tips and guidelines in this document provide a combination of options to avoid disaster (Remembering that no individual method of saving is 100% reliable)

What are my Options? - A quick overview

If you are working on one of JCU's General access labs you have access to several different ways to save and transport your work. Here are a few options and a brief description about them.

Homes Drive - Your own personal storage space allocated by the university. This holds up to 10MB of storage and files stored here are available from all the GATCF computers as your H: drive, and from home via a web browser through StudentsOnline

Shared Drive - A large temporary storage where files stored there are only available from the GATCF computer you are sitting at. Also known as E: drive on GATCF computers

3 1/2 inch Floppy Drive - Small, portable disk that can hold up to 1.44MB of storage. Also known as A: on GATCF computers

CD Burners - Use either write-once or reusable media to hold up to 700MB of storage: Also known an F: on GATCF computers

USB Drive - Sizes range from around 16MB up to multiple 1000's of MB. When plugged into a GATCF computer they usually show up as G: drive.

Email Attachment - If your disc isn't working or your home drive is unavailable you can always send your work as an attachment via email. JCU email supports attachments of up to 20MB in size

DVD Burner – Same as CD Burners but can store up to 4.7GB and only available in Library Workstations, BH149, WE024 and A204 in Townsville. Also library workstations in Cairns.

Home Drive

Your home drive is your university allocated storage space. This drive is not actually stored on the computer you are sitting on - it is just made available when you log in. By default your home drive can store about 10 Megabytes of data.

Ideally this is a good place to make short-term backups of your work as there really isn't enough space to keep all your documents and work on multiple new documents at the same time, especially if they include picture/video files.

The home drive is also used as the temporary storage space for a lot of common activities in the GATCF lab. Printing and saving documents usually requires a small amount of temporary space. If you experience troubles with either of these activites a good place to look is to see how much home drive space you have left ( 1 - 2 MB is a good number )

To see how much space you have used login to http://www.jcu.edu.au/Studentsonline and on the left hand menu under the title "Computing Information" there is a section called "Home Drive". From here you can see a a gauge with your used / free home drive space and links to accessing your home drive through the web browser.

Helpful Tips + Potential problems:
Be careful of how much you put on your home drive. It looks and acts like a hard drive in a computer but it is very easy to forget that the home drive doesn't have much space. 10 Megabytes is 30-40 Word Documents, but only 10-20 PDF files or 2-3 MP3's. You should only use your home drive for storing short-term backups of your work, not to download lecture notes to or email attachments. If you are looking for someplace temporary to store files use the shared Drive.

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