General ICT Help

Help with Saving Files

Students

Skydrive

Every student has 7GB of online storage as part of their Office365 email account. You can save to your Skydrive from the Office applications, e.g. Word, by selecting File > Save and Send > Save to web.

Personal File Store (PFS)

You also get 1GB of space allocated for your own files on a University central file server.
You can save to your PFS from any computer with Internet access, so you can access your files from home or abroad.
Save to the Documents library or My Documents folder on a Windows 7 University computer to save your files to your own PFS. (Note: you cannot save to the hard disk of standard student Windows computers).
For help with accessing your PFS, see 'How to use your Personal File Store'.

USB Memory Sticks / Flash Drives

USB or data sticks , which plug in to the computer's USB port, are a good option for storing your files.

Find out how to protect data stored on a USB stick

Remember: Always keep a copy of important files in more than one place. If you accidentally delete part/all of a file that is stored on Skydrive or in PFS, or a file becomes corrupted, you may not be able to get it back. Either keep a copy on portable media, or on your own computer or email it to yourself.

Staff

Personal File Store (PFS)

We recommend that you use this as your main file storage area.
Every member of staff has 4000mb (4Gb) of space allocated to them on the central file store for storing their own files.

Advantages of saving to your PFS

You can save to your PFS from any computer with Internet access, so you can access your files from staff PCs, from home, or from student Windows computers in labs and teaching rooms.
Only you have access to it - you must either have logged on to a University Windows standard secure computer, or used your username and password on any other computer in order to use it.
It is backed up regularly, so in the unlikely event of a systems failure, your files will be restored. However, you should always keep a copy of important files that are in your PFS. If you accidentally delete part/all of a file that is stored in PFS, or a file becomes corrupted, you may not be able to get it back. So we'd recommend you also keep a copy on your local hard disk, or on portable media such as CD, DVD or usb memory drive. (See the instructions for using Nero CD burning software).
On University Windows standard secure computers, it is very easy to save to your PFS:- just save your files in the 'My Documents' folder.

For help with accessing your PFS, see 'How to use your Personal File Store'.

Note: Saving files to your PFS does not increase the size of your roaming profile. However, saving files to your desktop does, so do not save files on your desktop.

Local Hard Disk

On all staff computers, you can save your files on the hard disk, otherwise known as the local disk or C: drive. But, you should only do so if absolutely necessary.
On Windows standard secure computers, there is a folder called 'Documents on this PC', which is on the hard disk.
If you are using a Windows standard secure computer, we recommend you only use the hard disk for backing up non-confidential files.

Disadvantages of saving to your local hard disk

Anyone who can log on to your computer will have access to your files, so they are not secure.
Backing up your files is totally your responsibility. If your hard disk fails, and you have not taken a copy of your files, you will lose them.

Shared Departmental Storage

If you work with corporate documents, or documents that need to be shared with your colleagues you can use your Departmental Shared Storage area. orage area, By convention, this appears as drive I: on staff PCs. You can also access this area from outside the University and on non-University devices.

We recommend that you use this area to store documents you need to share with colleagues, rather than copying them to cloud-based services such as Dropbox. Material of this type is usually sensitive, and cloud-based storage providers may not meet EU Data Protection requirements.

Please contact the IT Service Desk on ext. 2000 for further advice about this and other storage options such as public folders.

There is further advice in the document about keeping electronic information secure.

Deleting Files

Files deleted from your 'My Documents' folder will go into your Recycle Bin, so you can recover a file if you delete it by accident. There is an exception to this, which is if you access your 'My Documents' folder by choosing the 'U:' drive (home on prs-store2.unv.wlv.ac.uk) from the list under My Computer (Computer on a Windows 7 PC). Any file deleted from the 'U:' drive will not go into the Recycle Bin.

Date: May 2013
Last reviewed: May 2013