For the past several years, many of you have been saving your documents and files to the hard drive in your computer. This is the case if you save to either the Desktop or to “My Documents”. If you are not making backup copies of these files, you risk losing all of them if the hard drive stops working. This hard drive is the most mechanical part of a computer and will eventually fail. Once this happens, there is nothing that we can do to recover your files. Another problem with saving in this location is that you must be using this computer in order to access your files. If you go to another computer, your files won’t be there.

In order to help you with both of these issues, we have provided a place for each of you to save your files on one of the district’s servers. This file storage is specific to you and accessible only by you. Since it is on a server, you can access it from any computer in the district and backups are made nightly.

We encourage you to use this storage space. However, while we are pretty confident about being able to keep your files safe here, we are not responsible if your documents get deleted or corrupted. We highly recommend that you keep backup copies of any important files. The easiest way to do this is by keeping copies on a flash drive.

To use this network file storage, look for a “Z:” drive under My Computer (Windows) or a Staff icon on your desktop (Mac). Any files saved here will be available from any other computer when you log into it. (Other users will not have access to your files when they are logged in.)

Every staff user is allotted two gigabytes of storage on the network. For most users, this is more than enough to store most of the files that you use on a regular basis.