Guest Blogger: Averting Technology Disasters… or at Least Surviving Them!

            Recently I finished the first draft of my National History Day documentary.  At my school, NHD is due for a grade at the end of winter break. If students decide to take their projects to NHD competition, they have a few months to revise their projects before competition starts. Unfortunately, after submitting my project for school, I ran into some technical problems.  My computer, or rather IMovie, crashed and I was sure I had lost my entire project.

             After three hours of frantic calls to my tech-savvy friends, I was fortunately able to fix the problem, without any loss.  For those of you who have seen or experienced the amount of work that it takes to complete even a draft of NHD, I am sure that you understand how catastrophic this loss would have been.  Hopefully you will learn from my near-disaster, rather than experiencing one of your own, that it is critical to keep NHD files reliably saved and organized.  

Given that one can never be 100% immune from a computer crash, here are a few tips on organization that will also simplify recreating your documentary if the need arises:

1.      Make sure that all photos, music and video clips for your documentary are saved in organized folders on a computer so that they will be easy to find if need be.

2.      Back up all files on a flash drive or other back up device.

3.      Make a note of the specific clips of video and music that you are using, to cut down on edit time if you have to redo the project.

4.      Have a working script of your documentary on paper and in a word file. Insert where specific clips and photos will be.  (This makes editing the documentary simpler from draft to draft. It is also helpful if the original movie project is deleted).

Hopefully you will never run into any problems or need any of the backup files that you make, but it’s good insurance!