First, only have one working set of files. It is easy to have copies of files in multiple locations. One copy might be on your personal machine, one copy on a thumb drive, and another on a school lab machine.
Saving a backup copy is a good idea, in case something happens, but having multiple working copies can lead to confusion as you have multiple copies to keep track of their status.
An easier method is to use the thumb drive to copy files back and forth, but only work one place at a time. So if you were working at home and needed to take it to school, work, etc., you’d copy the files to the thumb drive, then copy them to the second computer. Work on the files there, then copy the changes back to the thumb drive. At home, you repeat the process, copying the files from the thumb drive to your personal machine. At no time would you work off the thumb drive, reducing the chances of over writing files which you just edited.
In a perfect world, you might use a software tool to make backup/restore files from place to place, however, you can’t always install a tool like that on a work or school machine.
Organize Your Files
A second tip, is to properly organize your files into a meaningful manner.
When I was a student, I had a folder under my documents called school. Under school, I had folders for each year and term. Under that, I had another set of folders, one for each class I was taking. Depending upon the class, I might have a folder for each project in the class.
Yes, this made for a large number of folders and sub-folders, and I was called retentive more than once. However, it made locating information very easy.
As an instructor, I’ve seen students who have projects for one class inside of another class folder. I’ve seen where folders were randomly placed on their desktop or on the documents folder, often both. I’ve seen students pull out three, four, or more thumb drives looking for where their file might be (often finding multiple copies on multiple drives – each one a slightly different version).
What’s worse if I’ve seen a student have a single copy on a lab computer, which gets erased by someone else, because you can’t control those computers.
Yes, my overly organized method takes a little time to set up – however, with a little work on the front end, it makes the day to day operations much easier. This is sometimes known as front end loading in software developer parlance.
Have Backup(s)
My final tip is simple – always have a backup. More than once a student has come to me, often in tears, as their only working project was deleted, lost, or destroyed. I’ve seen CDs cracked and scratched because they fell out of a case, thumb drives chewed up by a dog, and heard horror stories of computers lost due to age or lightning.
While UPS systems work great, unfortunately, you cannot fully protect your computer system from every possible issue. Therefore, always have a backup.
For myself, I keep an external drive which I periodically back up to, and I have an online backup service I use. I hate paying $80/year, but I love the peace of mind, and it has saved me a couple of times.
So have a backup, or two. If you can have multiple backups, store one offsite if possible. I’ve swapped backup drives with my father, I hold his and he holds mine. That way if something happened to one of our residences, the odds of it happening to two at the same time are astronomically small, we can feel fairly safe that we wouldn’t lose our data.
Determining Project Needs
Before you start building any web page, no matter how simple or complex your project plans to be, it’s good to determine the needs of your website first. The design and needs of your project will often determine how you organize your site and start building it.
The first thing to do is determine who is going to be using your website. What are their needs? What should they be attempting to accomplish?
This is often done by creating a user persona which checks to see what a typical person looks like.
Based upon what the person will need to do, you can start to devise the content, and thus files that they will need, and begin to determine how to organize that data.
Building Out Your Web Project File Structure was originally found on Access 2 Learn
