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Message: [QUOTE="John McGhie, post: 6867619"] Hi Little Creature: Yeah: Tell the students for "maximum credit" they need to convince you that they are storing their backup AWAY from the computer. I take my home backup to the office, and my office backup home. I store my home backups in the laundry/bathroom (least likely part of the house to burn down, and one place your average junkie thief will not think to look... Because these are "students" we are talking about, and they deserve to have a life of misery so they pay their dues, you might invite them to do a little "contingency planning". Consultants like me manage to make "Business Continuity Planning" or "Contingency Planning" bigger than Ben Hurr (and nearly as expensive as the movie...). But it's really very simple: systematic paranoia. What are the "Risks" we are trying to protect against? What are the "Impacts" those threats would have if they happened? What can we do to "Mitigate" each threat? What is the "Cost" of each mitigation? Add up all the impacts, subtract the mitigations and keep going until the cost of mitigation outweighs the cost of the impact :-) Add up your unmitigated risk impacts: that's your Residual Risk, go buy an insurance policy for that amount. At the very least you will save yourself a fortune in insurance :-) In the case of most home office/small office computers, the threats are: 1) User stupidity 2) Theft 3) Fire/Flood/Earthquake 4) Software failure 5) Hardware failure 6) Theft Everything except Theft is easy to deal with using the backup strategy I outlined yesterday. All of those other threats end up as a single impact: "The data is gone". Restore the backup, and the data is back, no worries. The peak residual risk is that you get to re-do a whole day's work. When talking to students or new users, it is important to stress the difference between a computer file and a paper file. If you get a flood and some of your paper files go under water, you will still be able to read "some" of the file. They need to really understand that a computer file is not like that: you can either read ALL of it, or NONE of it. There is no such thing as "partial" loss of a computer file :-) Theft is far more serious. Now, the data is NOT "gone", it's just that someone else has it. And you don't know who. And you don't know what they are going to do with it. Invite your students to prepare a one-page summary of the "Impact" that theft of their data would have, and some strategies for minimising it. Mark them "wrong" if they talk about the loss of the computer: that's not the issue. You can always buy another computer. The issue is that someone else has your data: what could they do with it, and how can you prevent that? Roughly 80 per cent of businesses that start up go broke within five years. But if we were to teach university students just the basics of Business Continuity Planing, I suggest that only half that number would fail. And you can teach the basics in an hour :-) As to a Mess folder, the idea has attractive possibilities. But I like your original idea "Don't empty the Trash until the system complains it's running out of disk space" :-) Cheers -- Don't wait for your answer, click here: [URL]http://www.word.mvps.org/[/URL] Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to. John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd [URL]http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/[/URL] Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50 +61 4 1209 1410, mailto:john@mcghie.name [/QUOTE]

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