Because there are so many scenarios in which students can choose to work, it is difficult to explain exactly how you should save your programs. Still, most weeks during a semester, one or more of my students will find out that the have not adequately saved their work. In these cases, the student has usually invested quite a few hours of work only to find out that the next day, their night's effort hasn't been saved.I can't do anything about this except to give them a tissue and tell them that it should take less than half of the time to repeat the work that they had done.
Here are a few rules that should keep you from losing most of your work
- Campus computers are not storage media
Your program is only stored on the one machine where you wrote the program. Any other student can erase that program. If another student submits your program as their work, you might be accused of cheating.
- Save regularly while you work
If your computer "crashes", the work that you have saved is likely retrievable once the computer is rebooted; if you save your work every 15 minutes, you've lost at most 15 minutes of work.
- Permanently save your work on at least two media
When you end a session, save your work twice. It is best to save your work on two separate physical entities (Andrew, your personal hard drive, and/or one or more floppy disks)
- Andrew is the least likely medium to have problems
Floppy disks are fallible, particularly if they end up in your backpack -- I have a carrying case for a couple of floppies which protects them against wear and tear (but not against magnets). Data on your hard drive is much more likely to be safe unless you're not cautious about viruses. Occasionally, Andrew can be unaccessible (but the data will remain there).