Author: James Sharp – Glendale Designs
Help….. My computer went down and I lost all my files! Have you ever been in that situation? I have received many calls from my customers and had to try and recover files. Think about it, months or years worth of work going down in a blink of a cursor.
Computers need to be maintained in more ways then one to keep working. If you retain good backups when something goes wrong you can feel safe if repairs require a major overhaul. But eventually your computer (box) will fail, you need to be prepared so when ever it does go down, the loss is minimal and you can get back up and running as fast as possible.
In working with our customers, I have found common mistakes that happen over and over. Once preventive steps were taken, essential data loss as well as hardware failure decreased. Here are a few things which have helped them.
Working Files
Select an area to place all working files, be it in the My Documents folder or another location on your hard drive. I have found it easier to work in a separate folder located on my C:\ drive. Click on your C drive.
Locate your hard drive
Select Make a new folder and call it what ever you like – for sample purposes I am calling it WorkingDocuments.
When you are working in any program, make sure the file is placed into this folder. This way when you are backing up your data files they are all located in one main folder. Depending on the industry you are working in, it may be easier to separate this by customer/clients/manufacturer or by year and then customer/clients/manufacturer. Keep in mind you can always create a shortcut and place it on your desktop for easy access to these files. When you are working within a particular program, you can many times change the default location for the working files. Example in Microsoft Word 2003 making the following change will change the default directory for your files:
Tools>Options>File Location Tab> then in the File Types – Highlight Documents and then select Modify. Browse for your default directory and press OK – then OK once more.
In just about any program, you can locate the default directory where files are to be opened from as well as where they need to be backed up to.
By changing these directories you will be able to locate your files faster, and when you plan to upgrade to another computer you don’t have to surf through your complete hard drive locating each directory. One of my customers would add various tax programs for each year. The problem arouse when they wanted to move their working client files over to another computer. Each tax program had to be reopened and the files located and moved to a central file location for the files to be totally moved to another computer.
Here is a quick and simple way to access your files – create a shortcut on your desktop which takes you directly into all your files. Right Click on your Desk Top>Select New>Shortcut
A wizard will appear, click browse.
Select the file folder you created earlier for your working documents,
Create a name for the shortcut and press finish
