Securing Your Files Preventing the loss of important files

Saving files can sometimes be tricky business. If you only save files to floppy disks, most likely you'll lose some files to bad or lost floppy disks. If you save files to your machine or to your SJC Network drive, they're generally safe, unless you accidentally delete them, or someone else deletes them, or unless your hard drive crashes, or one of the hard drives crash on a network server, etc...

The point is, there are several ways that you could lose important information that you're storing on a computer. It happens to people all of the time. So, what do we do to ensure that the files you store on our network file servers are safe? And, how can you best take advantage of this so that you can ensure that your important files are safe?

What we do is fairly simple. When you store files in your SJC Network drive, we make copies of the files and store them in a fireproof vault. Sounds pretty basic and simple, right? If you want to make sure that your important files are safe, then you should save a copy of each of them to our network servers and then we'll do our best to get a copy of them and store that copy away, in our fireproof vault. Simple.
(You may also want to check out our Guidlines for File Safety).

At any given time, we've got at least four months worth of files backed up. The way you can best take advantage of this is to make sure that you have a copy of all of your important files on our file servers at the end of every month. It should also be noted here that you do not want to rely solely on our copies of your files as your backups. These tapes that we store the backup copies of your files on have been known (from time to time) to fail. And, often times, if the tape does not fail it can take a number of hours to retrieve files from these tapes (remember, they hold a lot of information besides just your own information).

So, one of the best ways to make sure that you don't lose important files is to follow the simple guidelines laid out here.