Forgot your flash drive? (How to save your work or other items by e-mailing them to yourself!)

Have you ever found yourself working on one of the college's computers when you realize that you cannot save your work because you left your flash drive at home?

There is an easy way around this!

You can save your work (temporarily) to the computer that you're working on, and then e-mail it to yourself!

Just follow these steps:

1. Save the file to the computer.  This can be to the desktop or the documents folder.  The important thing is to remember where you saved it!
2. Log in to your e-mail.  This can be your HAWKMail or any other e-mail account that you regularly use.
3. Start a new message, and enter your own e-mail address in the to: field.
4. Use the attachment option and attach the file that you saved to the e-mail.
5. Send the e-mail.
6. Wait to make sure that the e-mail shows up in your mailbox, and that the document is successfully attached.
7. Go to the place that you saved the e-mail, and delete it from the public computer.

Feel free to check with a library staff member if you would like some additional help in doing this for the first time!

Flash Drive Disasters - How to back up when you don't have your own computer!

(Sigh)  This has not been a good semester for me and my flash drives.  Two in a row have mysteriously stopped working.  Lucky for me, I only use a flash drive as a temporary storage option, and I had only lost a few hours worth of work.

But - what if you are a student without a computer of your own?  That flash drive holds almost all of your academic work!  What if something happened to it?  You might lose, drive over, flush it or just about anything else!

One option would be to have a second flash drive, and regularly copy the information from one to the other.  However, if you carry these together at all times, you have the risk of losing both of them!

A second option would be to consider a service available online that can be used to store files.  The one that I'm most familiar with is Dropbox.com.  This is primarily used to share files between computers, but I realized that this would be a great second place to store your files if you only had a flash drive.

If you would like to try this, or share with a friend, I've created some step-by-step instructions for setting up an account and backing up your drive regularly.  Keep in mind that there is much more that you can do with Dropbox.  This information is for simply backing up the files on your drive.

Remember, though, a backup is only helpful if you back up your files regularly!  (And definitely after completing a 25-page research paper!)