My thoughts on Foibles and Blips

I've been reading the Academic Coach blog for a while now. Today she's writing about Formatting Foibles and other Last Minute Blips. She makes three key points and I thought I'd use my blog to lay out what I'm doing for each of those. Maybe one of my ideas will help someone who strays this way.

1. Use the university template. Yep. Check. I've got that one. I've known about that template and am using it. It's a bit cumbersome, but it's a lot easier than applying all those heading styles later. If you don't know how to apply styles, check the Help menu of your word processor. It's worth learning about it.
   
2. Develop a good backup strategy. I suppose my years as a network administrator have paid off for me. External hard drives are the way to go today. They're inexpensive and very portable. Each week (or after a particularly extensive work session), I back up my files to an external drive. Every two weeks or so, I back up to a second external hard drive which I have stored about 60 miles away. Admittedly, having a second house is an extreme back-up plan but when you live in Florida....
   When I worked out of state, I drove back with one external drive in my trunk and sent the other one via FedEx. A car accident - especially a fiery one, and I could have lost all my data. My friend called me "paranoid," but I was just being smart!
   Gmail, and the 2 GB of space they offer, wouldn't be a bad option for backups either. Read their privacy policy first to decide it will work for you. Mac users can leverage a gMail account using gDisk if they want. There's something similar for PC users, but I haven't tried it.
   
3. Craft a file naming scheme to distinguish different versions of the dissertation. I use dissertation.MM.DD.doc as my naming scheme. Each day I work, I save with that day's date. I should probably add two (or 4) digits for the year, but I'm not planning to go into 2007 for this project! Not only does this help me keep track of revisions, but I can also recover if I do some editing I later regret.