When shutting down your staff laptop you will see it "sync'ing", which sometimes is very quick and sometimes takes quite a while. What exactly is it doing?

For all of our users, both staff and students, we backup the data in your My Documents folder and on your desktop. This is done for 2 reasons:

1. Have you ever had a computer crash and you lost all of your data? Well that won't happen here because you have this backup and it is linked to your login name. So if your laptop crashes, all you need to do is login as yourself on any other computer in the system. Your data will be there as usual. And if we are able to give you a loaner laptop until yours is repaired, your data will be there as well.
2. Students more often than not will work on projects in one lab one period and then continue it later in another lab another period. In other systems they have to save their data on a USB drive and keep up with it. But at GCSS all they have to do is login as themselves on any computer and their data is there.

• Note that on this last point, since we give all students a network folder from the day they start school, it is possible for them to keep data from grade 1 through 12. 

So keep in mind that you CAN elect to cancel sync'ing but you run the risk of losing your data if your computer has a problem. This is also true if you save to a location other than your desktop and My Documents folder, these are the only locations that are backed up.


KEP