Protecting Your Data

content last updated 6-21-2019

SAVE YOUR FILES TO A PERSONAL STORAGE DEVICE

Your files are your responsibility. It's good practice to save them to a high-speed, personal storage device. Learn more about types of personal storage devices »

Any files you save to a lab computer's internal hard drive are subject to deletion. Learn if your files will be retained at logout and for how long »

The department does not back up the files you save on lab computers' internal hard drives or in your XARTS Network Drive, so they could be lost in the event of user error, severe hardware failure, or other catastrophe.

BACK UP YOUR PERSONAL STORAGE DEVICE

Personal storage devices are not immune to failure. Back up the files on all your devices to another device or a cloud storage service like Google Drive or Drop Box.

All USF citizens have a Google Drive account with unlimited storage as part of their myUSF account.

SAVE OFTEN

Get in the habit of periodically pressing [Command] + [S] to save your document. (Power outages are not unheard of on the USF campus...)

SAVE MULTIPLE VERSIONS

Instead of repeatedly overwriting a document every time you save it, periodically save a copy of it and add a date or version number to the end of the filename e.g. "My Project v1.ai", "My Project v2.ai", "My Project v3.ai" etc. That way you can revert to an older version of the file if you accidently make an irreversible mistake.

LOG OUT COMPLETELY WHEN FINISHED

When you finish using a computer, completely log out of your user account.^* If you don't, your files and logged-in websites can be accessed by anyone who walks up to the computer.

* Heads up! Your files aren't secure until the computer screen returns to the login window; that is, until it displays the username and password fields for the next lab user. So don't immediately walk away from the computer after you select the "Log Out" command. The system might require you to take some action before completely logging you out; for example, the system will always ask if you want to save changes to open files.