Back it up, Bucknell!

The campaign

Library and Information Technology strongly recommends that students back up their personal data on an external hard drive. In addition, each student has 600mb of private network space, which should be used to safely store vital academic work. Bucknell staff and faculty should have a back up plan for their home personal computer as well.

Beginning in Summer 2008, the Tech Desk will not recover and restore data for computers checked in at the desk. We will expect that you will have backed up your own documents, music, photos, etc.

The background

Over the years, we have seen hundreds of failing hard drives at the tech desk. In some cases, data can be recovered - in other cases, everything is lost! It happens with new computers and older ones, desktops and laptops, Windows and Macs . . .

The process

Back up your important academic work to your 600mb of network space.
Back up the rest of your data to an external hard drive.
Mac users with Leopard should use the built-in Time Machine software for backup.

You can buy an external hard drive for $75-125 dollars. Some come with their own backup software. Others require that you just copy your data over to another drive. Library and IT can offer recommendations, help at the desk, support for the process, and documentation to help you back things up.

The reasons why you want a backup of all of your data

Academics - Have you written papers, theses, lab reports, etc.? Have you put a copy in your network private space for safekeeping?
Photos - Have you taken hundreds or thousands of pictures from your travels, parties, dorm room, spring breaks, and time studying abroad? Have you deleted them from your camera, so they only exist in one place?
Music - Have you invested a lot of time downloading, burning, ripping, buying and organizing multiple gigabytes of music? Legal or not, if your hard drive dies, and you don't have a backup, you may lose it all.
Hard drive failure - In some cases, you know exactly why your hard drive dies - you dropped it, spilled a coke on it, saw it coming with blue screens, etc. In other cases, there is no warning at all - one day, your laptop fails to boot with a message like 'Error reading fixed disk.'
The Tech Desk will not back up or recover your data for you!

WVBU Promotional spots
Promo 1
Promo 2

YouTube video
Lost everything . . .

Posters (pdf)

Do you feel lucky? It's Tuesday . . .
Back it up, Bucknell. 2 places . . .
What do I back up? Where do I buy a hard drive?
What do I back up? What do I need?
Won't the Tech Desk . . .? How much does it cost?
How much network space do I have?

FAQs

How do I get started?

Will Library and IT recover and move all of my data if I bring my laptop in to the Tech Desk?

How hard is it to back up my data if I don't know much about computers?

Aren't Macs less likely to have a problem than Dells or HPs or other Windows computers?

What kind of external hard drive should I get and how much will it cost?

Can't I put all of my important documents in my private space in Netspace?

Why did my hard drive fail?

Can't I just burn stuff to a CD or DVD or put it on a USB flash drive?