atw: Re: File paths
- From: Suzy <SuzyDavis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:51:12 -0500 (CDT)
hello
Paul! I think you are forgetting about those that work for large
global corporates. These companies don't want to give you any
reason to not be working and their workforce is constantly
travelling and working in places without access to the network, at
customer sites, airports, hotels, home ...
It comes down to user responsibility - ensure backups are made to
an external drive regularly; but generally everyone who works in
these places suffers from ADD and doesn't. We recently had to
evacuate due to a fire in the building - everyone stopped and was
horrified at how long it had been since their last major backup.
Some admitted they had never backed up.
Do you know what these people rely on for their backups in the
short term? Email. At least if you send that really important
document to someone for review it's at least off your machine and
on a backed up server.
This is generally the most efficient for us as you usually need to
send it to someone (but I know some people send to themselves)
anyway.
But Christine, back to your original question -
- Most companies who have an in-house workforce and who use
Microsoft Office do use My Documents and set up "My Documents" to
be mapped to the H drive (home).
- global corps like I've described above, if using Microsoft
Office will go with standard Office file paths.
- using the C: drive or a partitioned drive? Nothing wrong with
that for a home user, but if you are an MS Office user then you
would need to change where all your default file location settings
are so you don't have to keep finding it each time. Nothing wrong
with that either, and I used to favour the use of a partitioned
drive for all my files. Very easy to backup. But for a new user
who is using MS Office I would stay with default settings. Teach
them how to create sub-folders. Then tell them about more
sophisticated alternatives. For 90% it won't be an issue
As a Word support person in corporations I see a lot of variations
and personal preferences in this - from people who have been Mac
users, or never been taught, the desktop is where they keep
everything [shudder]; to standard My Documents and sub-folders, to
more personalised. A lot of my colleagues don't actually have a
procedure they follow and are constantly trying to find the latest
changes they made to a document - usually these are found
eventually in their Outlook OLK file folder - if at all.
The problem with the Desktop used to be that it wasn't backed up
(or even regarded as more than tmp files by the operating system -
think it might have just been stored only in RAM at one stage) -
but in current versions of Windows, the Desktop is stored under
the Documents and Settings folder - so not such an issue.
Bottom line - if you are teaching your students to save their
documents in one central location - fantastic. If you are
teaching them to categorise their files in folders and sub-folders
in that location. They will be streets ahead of the average
user.
HTH
regards
Suzy
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