atw: Re: File paths

Thanks Suzy

There's nothing like documenting or training things to make you learn them.
I have only spent yesterday and a few hours today working with the User
structure (was My Documents in XP) and wonder why I have not been using it
before.  It's very clever.

Regarding backups, I have only just set my system to backup on-line to Mozy,
and the great thing about this is that you can set it to automatically start
a backup once the system is idle for a certain period.  That gets over the
user failure of simply forgetting to back up.  It takes forever to get your
first round of files backed up, but from there it does synchronised backups,
so the level of file exchange is just today's work.  

My external hard disk is set the same way, but requires me to specify a set
time to start the backup, so if I have shut my computer down by that time,
no backup.

Windows Vista also has some kind of automatic backup utility, which crashed
my computer and locked things up horribly when I first tried to use it, so I
have forgotten about it - but it has probably been fixed with an automatic
patch by now.

Christine
 

-----Original Message-----
From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Suzy
Sent: Tuesday, 23 September 2008 9:51 AM
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: atw: Re: File paths

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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