Most people have had a computer lock up or the power fail in the middle of working on a large document or spreadsheet. Spending time re-creating what was lost can be minimized by manually saving your work frequently, configuring your Microsoft Office programs to auto-save and making sure there is a backup of all your work.

Auto-save should be turned on in your Excel or Word options if you use these programs. If your computer locks up or the power fails, the auto-save function will provide you with a recovered version of your document from the last automatically saved file.

A good guideline is to set auto-save to 10 minutes. If you set it to occur too frequently, it may adversely affect the performance of your system. If you the time between auto-saves too long, you may lose a large amount of data in case of a failure.

The Office of Internal Audit always checks for system backups when conducting an audit. When a computer hard drive or system fails, loss of information means a huge loss in productivity while data is recovered or re-created. All files should be backed up in a secure manner on a regular basis.

There are many ways to back up the information on a computer. You should contact the Office of Information Technology help desk (740-593-1222) or your departmental IT staff to determine the best process to use to meet your needs. You must have some type of backup system in place; don't assume someone else is taking care of it. Find out for certain if backups are performed on whatever system stores your files -- whether it is your computer, a server in your department or a server housed or maintained by someone else.

Finally, don't assume that your backup process is working correctly. You should test it periodically to make certain the information on the backup is recoverable if you need it. Just like a security camera video with quality too poor to identify anyone, a failed backup may be useless.