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