Saving Your Work

Computers sometimes crash. While you are working, suddenly everything stops working and the screen "freezes," or an error message appears and the machine restarts or shuts down. These crashes are usually caused by problems in the software but can also be caused by problems in the hardware of the computer, or by computer viruses (malicious programs).

You have probably heard about people who have lost hours or even months of work when their computer crashed. This kind of catastrophe can easily be prevented with a few simple precautions.

• Never work for more than 10 or 15 minutes without saving your work on a storage device.
  Most programs keep the information you are working with in the computer's volatile RAM memory until you save it on a storage device. That means if you haven't saved your work and the power goes out or the computer crashes, the information will be lost. However, any information stored in nonvolatile memory (like a hard drive) will still be there.
• Keep at least one backup copy of your work
  Hard drives, flash drives, CD-ROMs—any storage device can fail. Thus it is important always to have a backup copy of your work. If you have your own computer, you can save your work on the internal hard drive and keep a backup on a removable disk. If you use a school or work computer, then use the hard drive while you work, but move your information from the hard drive to two safe places when you are done. For example, save one copy to a flash drive and another to a network directory.

Note: Don't leave confidential information (like homework answers or love letters) on a networked computer's local hard drive, since the next person to use the computer could find those files and read them.