In these 169 tech-centric situations, you get an overview of pedagogy—the tech topics most important to your teaching—as well as practical strategies to address most classroom tech situations, how to scaffold these to learning, and where they provide the subtext to daily tech-infused education.
Today’s tip: How to backup a doc in 5 seconds
Category: Problem-solving
Q: I’m paranoid about losing lesson plans, report card comments, and other school work. I backup, but is that enough?
A: Truth, I am the most paranoid person I know about technology. For backup, I have an external hard drive, Acronis, a 512-gig flash drive for ‘important’ stuff (which turns out to be everything), and still I worry.
Here’s my additional five-second backup: Every time I work on a document I just can’t afford to lose (again, that’s pretty much everything), I email it to myself. In MS Office, that’s a snap (see Tech Tip #61). Other programs–just drag and drop the file into the email message. I set up a file on my email program called ‘Backups’. I store the email in there and it waits until I’m tearing my hair out. I’ve never had to go there, but it feels good knowing it’s available.
Note: That doesn’t work on my cloud spreadsheet files, say in Google Sheets, because they’re usually too big. In this case, I download to my local drive and save to a dedicated folder.
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Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.
Greetings. Its been quite a while not seeing your visit to my blog – hoping all is well. Thank you. Bliss.
Thanks for the visit! I don’t see any recent posts on your blog. Am I missing something?
Emailing it to yourself that’s an interesting idea. One of the great advantages of working for a big company is that they often have configuration management systems where you save your work several times a day and you can work with lots of people on the same documents without problems. They also have big backup systems that they run every day in case of computer and server crashes. You never have to worry about your work being saved and safe. On the other hand you are often not allowed to backup online due to secrecy/confidentiality issues.
That is all true, Thomas. The ’email to myself’ works if the file is small enough. Word docs–usually. Spreadsheets–not so much!