Every teacher of this course has heard “my laptop died” in the last week of a project. It is always true, and it is never a reason anyone can do anything about afterwards. Ten minutes of setup makes it a shrug instead.
The rule professionals use
Three copies, on two kinds of media, one of them somewhere else.
For your work that means, concretely:
- The copy you are typing on.
- A copy that syncs automatically — your school or personal cloud folder — so that a save is a backup.
- A copy that is not connected to your machine at all: a USB drive in a drawer, updated at the end of each unit.
The third one is the odd one out on purpose. Anything connected can be damaged by the same event: ransomware encrypts the synced folder too, and a mistaken delete syncs cheerfully to the cloud. A drive in a drawer is immune to both.
The end-of-unit routine, in four minutes
- Close your editor, so nothing is half-written.
- Copy the whole
ICS3Ufolder to the USB drive. The whole folder — not the file you think matters. - Rename that copy on the drive to something like
ICS3U — end of Unit 2. This is an archive: a snapshot you do not intend to change again, kept so you can go back to a version that worked. - Eject the drive properly, and put it somewhere that is not your backpack.
Backups and archives are different jobs. A backup answers “my machine is gone”. An archive answers “it worked on Tuesday and I have broken it since” — which is the more common emergency, and the one a synced folder alone will not save you from, because it has faithfully synced your mistake.
A copy you have never restored is not a backup
Once, before you need it: open the backup on a different machine and run the program from there. People discover on the worst day that they backed up a shortcut, an empty folder, or a file the other machine cannot open.
The habit is assessed, not just recommended: the culminating project asks where your backup is, and The Toolbox expects the whole folder kept somewhere that is not the machine you type on.