Take a look at the picture below. This is roughly what you should see when you double click the MyComputer icon on your Windows 9x desktop. At Co-Lin we map several drives to network resources. One of the most important drive mappings that we do is setting drive w: to your home directory on the weswin01 file server. Every account has a corresponding home directory. Only that user and nosy system administrators have access to the files contained in that folder. Your password protects your files. If your login id is "ibdum" and your password is also "ibdum", you could be asking for trouble. You need to change your password on a regular basis.
Notice the square blue blob which says Jmcinnis on Weswin01\home\faculty. You too have one of these drives. How can you use it? Look below:
In the above example, I want to save a Word document to my network drive. I select Save As... and then I see this:
I select the Jmcinnis on Weswin01 .... drive and then save my file. If I wanted to be even more organized, I could also create subfolders in that location.
To make things even easier: From the MS Word Tools menu, select Options and you will see the screen pictured above. Select Documents and Modify and specify w:\My Documents (or an other folder) as the location for your files. Now MS Word is set to automatically save your documents to your network home directory.
Just today an instructor came to my office very upset because their computer had crashed. The hard drive actually died, would not spin and it was a new system. It happens. Gateways, Dells, Howards. They all have hard drives and they may die new or old. If the data had been saved on the network home directory, this person could have used a co-worker's computer to login to their account and retrieved the data instantly and could have waited patiently while we had the hard drive replaced. Our backup system will allow for daily backups of your data. In the future it may even be possible for us to provide you with access to an archive. Even if you delete the file then suddenly six months later decide that you really needed it, we might possibly have it on an archive in the bank vault. A small cash transaction, and BOOM, the file is restored. One more thing, if you are that person whose whole life work is sitting on a floppy disk right next to a cup of coffee near the big magnet....That's the kind of stuff that make for a good Steven King novel.
Now for advice on how to get a nasty memo from the system administrator. If you were to save 500Mb of Brittany Spears mp3 files to your network home directory, they might suddenly vaporize. The space is allocated for mostly official work. It is not a Napster storage bin.