Where to store your files

Everyone in the university is allocated an area of file storage space on the mainframe computer. This filestore is where you keep your work so that it can be found and used again. This is referred to as your central filestore or as the M: drive.

Your filestore is for storage only. This is backed up automatically for you every night and is a very safe way of keeping your work.

Connection to your central filestore is made across the network. Sometimes the network is busy and this can cause problems so you must never work directly from your filestore. You should not work from the A: drive (floppy drive) for similar reasons.

The best way of working on public workstations is to save newly created work in the first instance in My Documents. This is a folder on the hard disk drive (D:\docs) of the workstation you are using at the time.

It is by far the fastest and safest way of working.

To store your work so that you can find it and work on it again you must Copy it across to your filestore before you log out from your session. When you want to work on it at another time you must Copy it from your filestore and Paste it to My Documents. You cannot leave it in My Documents as this folder is automatically cleared every night.

If you follow these good working practices you always have a stored (or safe) copy.

You may also want to keep extra copies of your work on floppy disks as backup or so that you can carry them with you when you need to work somewhere without access to the network. Treat all floppy discs as storage, never work directly from them.