In this day and age of working and studying online, no one should lose any data. A few years ago, I lost data — and a part of my life — through photos! I undertook that this tragedy would never be repeated.

In this day and age of working and studying online, no one should lose any data. A few years ago, I lost data — and a part of my life — through photos! I undertook that this tragedy would never be repeated.

I have previously described my working environment and the computer hardware I use. Here, I would like to explain in detail how I structure my data for my online studies.

Firstly, I am connected to UoPeople via my Google Mail (Gmail) address. That means that I send and receive all my emails from a Gmail account. I use Thunderbird as my Gmail mail client. Thunderbird is terrific for setting up rules to manage email.

I have a rule in Thunderbird which moves all UoPeople mail from the Inbox to the UoPeople folder. As I am writing this, that folder alone has by now 16,000 emails in it! And I am a hoarder, so I keep all those emails.

When transferring my Thunderbird from computer to computer (e.g., reinstalling or replacing your old machine), I just copy the %appdata%\Thunderbird folder to an external drive and replace it after the installation.

Google gives you 15GB of free space for your email and Google Drive. If it is not enough, you can buy extra space. I have increased my Google storage to 200GB for $2.64 per month.

Your Google Drive is usually stored at C:\Users\[user name]\Google Drive. I have created a UoPeople folder below the Google Drive folder. This folder contains all files related to the university, such as academic calendars, a register of all my payments, and a curriculum for the courses I plan to take. Then I have three folders below the UoPeople folder called _Completed, _Current, and _Future. The three classes I am currently doing are obviously in the _Current folder. Once completed, I drag and drop those sub-folders into the _Completed folder. The _Future folder is for any material I find online that might help in courses I plan to take in the future.

My computer is always online. I very seldom work offline. That means that my Google Drive is continuously updated.

You do not have to do the above. There are many other options too. You can use Microsoft OneDrive and their Office 365 mailboxes instead of Google Mail. Another shining star in the online storage world is Dropbox.

When you submit your assignments on Moodle, the server stores them from time to time. I pasted a lot of text in the Discussion Forum, and minutes later, the internet connection failed. I thought I lost the data. But when the internet was restored, the pasted data was still there.

If you are really paranoid about losing data, you can also use Google Drive as described above and then use SyncBack or SyncBackPro to synchronise it with your Dropbox folder. If you have web server space, SyncBack can synchronise it for you by using FTP.

Whatever you do, work online, and you should not lose anything.