Gonville & Caius Students’ Union

If you've ever had a computer die on you, you'll know how stressful it is worrying about whether the last few month's worth of documents are safe or not. Some people back up their documents in the holidays when they are at home, but students quite regularly have accidents during term (coffee spillages, dropped laptops, etc etc) which means they can sometimes risk losing up to a term's worth of work.

The GCSU strongly recommends that students back up their documents regularly. You can do this in a variety of ways:

1. Use an external hard drive (or USB Key, iPhone, even a friend's computer...)
2. Each student gets 500MB of storage on the Cambridge PWF network (which can be increased if necessary). Details of how to access the PWF from your machine can be found at http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/pwf/remote/
3. www.dropbox.com offers 2GB of free storage, with an added 200MB for every member you refer. Dropbox has the advantage of making your documents accessible from any machine with internet-access! Just watch the bandwidth as it can rack up quite easily if you frequently make changes to the contents of your Dropbox folder!
4. Your faculty may offer students storage - just email your faculty to find out what's available

Finally, in the unfortunate (and generally unlikely) event that your computer does die on you during termtime, it is highly unlikely that you will have actually lost your data, though retrieving it can often be a slight chore. PC World offers a data recovery service starting from £10-20, as do many companies around and about Cambridge. The University Computing Service can also do repairs, and generally have a very quick turnover time: http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/