Mind Your Media: Keeping Data Safe for Multimedia Projects
By Mike Gates, Student Multimedia Design Center
At the Student Multimedia Design Center (SMDC), we recommend our users save their work to an external storage device or frequently save their progress to a cloud storage service. This helps prevent data loss in the event a program crashes, the computer freezes or a power outage occurs!
The computers at the SMDC refresh to a default disk image every time they are restarted, which means anything saved to the computer will be removed upon restart, so saving to an external storage device or cloud service is doubly important when working on our machines.
The following are some storage options that you may want to use when working on your next multimedia project:
External Hard Drives
External hard drives are available for a 3-day loan at the SMDC. Each 500GB in size, the hard drives feature two partitions, one formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for Mac OS and one formatted NTFS for Windows PCs. Since it usually takes longer than three days to work on video projects, the hard drive kits can be renewed two times, resulting in a maximum loan time of nine consecutive days.
Flash Drives
USB-A and USB-C flash drives are available at the SMDC for 4-hour in-library use loans. These are handy when you need to quickly copy documents between computers. The flash drives are also commonly used when printing posters in the SMDC, since we ask for the file on a flash drive. Don’t have one with you? No problem, you can borrow one!
Google Drive
Did you know that you have 50GB of cloud storage on Google Drive through your UD email account at no additional charge to you? (Alumni have 15GB.) Uploading to Google Drive is quick and easy. Making it even easier, when you upload a same-named document to Google Drive, it conveniently updates the file to a new “version” so that you can revert to an older save if you need to.
Note: There is a Google Drive for Desktop app you can install on a PC or Mac computer that allows for even quicker and easier uploads!
UD Dropbox
The University has a digital drop box system that allows anyone to send a document to a UD student, faculty or staff member. Additionally, non-UD affiliated parties may “pick-up” (download) a file dropped-off to them by a UD student, faculty or staff member.
This service can be used to drop-off a file to yourself in the case that you do not have a flash drive or external hard drive to save it on. The files uploaded to UD Dropbox only last for 30 days, so remember to pick them up in a timely manner!
Other Third-Party Solutions
There are a variety of other cloud services available that can be used, some that can be used for free and others that are subscription-based or have paid upgrades.
Dropbox is a popular service that can be used for free with a basic-level account that includes 2GB of storage. Dropbox has a desktop app that can be used to quickly upload and save files.
Microsoft OneDrive is a cloud storage service offered by Microsoft via the Microsoft 365 platform. A Microsoft 365 “free” account allows you access to the free versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint along with 5GB of OneDrive storage.
Adobe Creative Cloud is a subscription-based suite of multimedia apps offered by Adobe. Students may sign up and subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud for a discounted rate of $19.99 per month for the first year. Along with the suite of 20 apps that includes Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro, the subscription also includes 100GB of cloud storage that can be conveniently accessed in the open/save menus in all the Creative Cloud apps.
Note: If you need to use Adobe Creative Cloud apps and do not have a subscription, the Multimedia Studios and Room B at the SMDC have the apps installed and free to use! You will not be able to save to Adobe cloud storage without a paid Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
This article is part of the weekly series “Multimedia Tips and Tricks,” which shares content in response to frequently asked questions at the Student Multimedia Design Center. We’d love to hear from you. Please share your feedback with us by filling out our survey.
