Student guide: how not to lose your notes if you lose your laptop

The new academic year is approaching, and with it the texts that we publish on laptops for the new academic year. They are an indispensable tool today. They allow us to take notes clearly and without getting tired or slipping as soon as we know how to write at a good pace in class, and continue at home. Without a doubt, laptops are the best tool for students, especially college and university students. But a constant that we see in social networks is that people lose or steal them, and with it their notes, progress, and work End of Degree and End of Master.

To avoid losing days and hours of work, and that the most that is lost is the hardware, we are going to leave a series of recommendations. They are to avoid that, if your laptop is stolen or lost in one of the many comings and goings that you will have in an academic year, you lose your notes and we have it for TFG, TFC, trevall de reçerca or any university work. Remember that if you lose a laptop, it can be replaced, but not the time you have been working on your notes or academic work.

Create a folder on your mobile and put a backup copy of your notes and work there every day so you don't lose them

As ubiquitous as the mobile phone is today, which is a much more powerful computer than a computer ten years ago; and few people use it as their own computer. Today everyone has a smartphone. The normal thing is that it has a capacity of about 16 GB of internal memory, and Possibility to put more through a MicroSD card, which are very cheap to get for very large capacities.

Thus, we always have a device with a high storage capacity on hand. And since normally, only we access the mobile phone and we protect it with a password and pattern, our files on the mobile phone will have high physical protection and we will always have a device on hand to save our student work and notes.

Join cloud services and back up your notes

Idealistically, we opt for having a physical NAS due to the problems posed by cloud services. They are linked to an online account and of which we do not have full control, nor over what the services do with our files. But if we are in a student residence or shared apartment, getting a NAS may not be possible.

Luckily, there are several cloud storage services that can be another backup to do for emergencies. Some of them are free and offer us enough free storage to save numerous files on PDF and for text editors like Word or LibreOffice.

Free cloud storage to save your notes

• Dropbox: The basic Dropbox plan is 2 GB. It is enough if your student work is based on Word and PDF documents, and with the possibility of synchronizing with up to three devices. But it is possible that in more ambitious jobs such as computer science or artistic careers, you will fall short. There are plans to expand up to 2 TB and expand the number of synchronized devices. The Dropbox app on PC and mobile allows you to leave a dedicated space on your devices to automatically sync.
• OneDrive: If you have a Microsoft account, you have a OneDrive account. The account you made to validate your copy of Windows gives you free One Drive storage.
• Google Drive: If you have a Google account, you have a Google Drive account. For free, between Google Photos, Gmail, and Google Drive, you get 15GB of free storage with expandability. But it's all tied to keeping your Google account. If you do things that are against the terms of use of another Google service, you will lose access to your account and your data.

If you have a data plan, you can choose to update the files in your cloud services using your hotspot mobile. It is not ideal if your data rate is one of the smallest. But for small files and using access only as long as necessary, can be very useful and thus avoid delaying the update of new files to your cloud storages.

It can be very cumbersome to use them all, but remember the saying “there is no cloud, it is someone else's computer«. This means that the more copies in the cloud you make and if you make them physical, the better.

Use a portable storage drive for everyday use and keep your files there

Pen Drive, skewer, portable hard drive... Call it what you want, but today a portable storage unit is an accessory that you should always have with you, next to the mobile, the wallet and the keys. It allows you to have files at hand, ideal to send to print in a comfortable way. They are not expensive, and you can have a considerable amount of storage for less than 20 euros, and it is sold in any electronic store, or even supermarkets such as Aldi or Carrefour. A very small price to make sure you don't lose notes.

If the convenience factor is important, there are even USB storage drives shaped like a credit card, so they fit into the space of a card and so you always have it in your wallet. Needless to say, these may not have a large amount of storage and being constantly on the go, they can get lost, thus we recommend that this be a temporary storage until we have everything on a larger and safer unit that will not be lost, such as an external hard drive at home.

Have a large local storage unit at home to store your bachelor's, bachelor's or master's thesis

You may think that a conventional USB storage is enough, but the reality is that a small one is at risk of being lost easily. To have files locally in your usual residence, the ideal is to have an external hard drive or External SSD of considerable physical size and storage. It is important that it hardly physically moves and is easily locatable.

That external storage and its connectors they should not leave the house or the room. So you have the certainty that the external hard drive is where it should be. It must be as localized as possible and move as little as possible.

Practice a routine to synchronize your vital files for studies

There is no point in having several accounts in cloud services and not using them regularly. Try to have a routine for updating files related to your studies. Ideally, it should be daily or twice.

You can have a routine that consists of updating the notes you have made in class as soon as you get to your room, and before going to sleep you update the files related to your TFG. The important thing is that every major change to the files, be the minimum time without having a backup in various physical storages or in the cloud.

Why do we make such a long text just to say “make backups”?

We are a website dedicated to hardware, software and everything related to computing. One constant that we have been seeing over the years is that the use of laptops in educational settings has been fully embraced. While more people than ever use laptops, We believe that the level of use beyond what they consider "user» is insufficient.

That is why we make this text, to emphasize the importance of backing up important documents. Here we have reviewed numerous NAS, from the smallest to the largest. About the smaller NAS, for home use, we think they should be in every house. They allow to have in physical and controlled the important papers, be they bureaucratic, of notes and of End of Degree Project or End of Career. That's why we think they're ideal for the students we see lose a laptop on public transport every year. The power of a NAS is underestimated even for home users, and it's not hard to see how useful they can be.

It is true that we have recommended many cloud services, but they are subject to keeping our accounts accepted. Since they are on mega servers, they can be prone to a ransomware attack. It does not mean that it will never happen to us with a NAS. But it is more unlikely because an attack scales less if it has to be spread across several small NAS.

In short, make all the backups you can

This text is reduced to this. Make a backup copy of all your notes, degree and master's projects. Make the largest number of backup copies in systems that have a minimum reliability. Thus, if you lose the laptop, you will have the notes in numerous services, and possible physical storage to recover them as soon as you have acquired a new computer. It will have cost you money to have to replace the laptop, but at least you will not have wasted the fruit of your time and effort.

Is it really important to make backup copies of notes?

If it is It is totally important to make backup copies of your notes and work.. Anything you've worked on, whether it's a nonprofit project, your studies, or your job, should have a few backup copies. It is not safe to trust all your data to a pen drive that moves a lot.

With so many clouds within reach that come as a gift with our GMail or free email account, with external hard drives and mobile phones as additional storage, you have many options for making backup copies. use them.

Think like Murphy's Law: «If something can go wrong, it will go wrong«. Is it possible to lose your data on a flash drive? You will lose it. Is it possible to lose your laptop with your notes on it? You will lose them. To minimize the damage, try to have as many backups as possible., because this way you will have more places from which to recover your notes and work in the undesirable event that you lose your laptop or USB memory.