Student accounts are created during the first two weeks of each quarter and exist only for that quarter.

Instructors are required to submit grades within 3 days of the completion of final exams. At that time, all student accounts will be deleted in preparation for the upcoming quarter. If you take another class in the following quarter you will be issued a new account with possibly a different username and definitely a different password.

When your account is deleted all files you've saved on our servers will be deleted automatically! It is the student's responsibility to ensure they have their work saved to their disk or local computer!

If you are a web-publishing type student this should not be a problem. In your case you should never edit the files on our servers directly. Instead you be editing your files on your local computer and then simply uploading your work to be viewed by the public via our web server. The folder structure on your machine should mirror the structure on our machines, and our machines actually provide a backup for your home computer!

If you are a UNIX type student who is remotely logging into our machines, using our editors, and saving your work to our machines... you will need to learn to use SFTP or a similar tool to copy your work back to your local computer.

The lab staff does backup our systems but this is done to restore machines in the event of a catastrophic system failure on our end, and to archive student work in the case of a grade dispute with an instructor. It is not their job to help you find your lost file and you may find them unwilling to do so.

It is the responsibility of the student to back up their personal files.