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Graduate students and others are often expected to have personal devices to facilitate their group's research, such as a laptop. ChemIT can help, as time permits. Help us help you by understanding what we can do for you. Thank you!

Who is this for?

  • This page mostly pertains to Chemistry graduate students and Post Docs who are having a problem with their personal laptop which they use for research.

What is ONE thing you must know?

No single copy of data is safe. If it's valuable to you, have copies in more than one location.

  • See below for related tips.

What is your device's problem?

  • ChemIT will provide a 10 minute limit look-see and consultation, if someone qualified is available to help.
    • From this, we hope we’d be able to help characterize the problem and offer initial recommendations and options.
    • Problems we see:

What can ChemIT do about the problem?

  • If resolution seems to require more of ChemIT's staff time, we will coordinate with you a date/ time we can work on it further. This scheduling is dependent on our other work, but we will attempt to to do so within a week.
    • Obviously the device must be returned to us at the appointed time for us to do the work, if the device is not left with us.
    • Although we will commit to working on your device at the committed time, we will limit our time to that block of time we commit to (45 minutes?). If we cannot resolve the issue then, we will provide you with the current status and options.

Results:

  • We expect this process to make it clearer to you regarding when we will focus on your personal device's problem, and with more certainty.
  • For ChemIT, this process will:
    • Limit our involvement with problems related to personal devices to ensure we are not over-investing in this specific area of service.
    • This process will protect ChemIT when we doing other work so that this specific kind of walk-in work doesn’t unexpectedly shift our focus beyond 10 minutes.

 

Backup information for those using personal devices

  • Sold state and spinning disks do fail, and with some regularity.
  • Devices do get stolen.
  • Software does fail, including operating systems. Often helped along by malware.

You must take responsibility to avert lost data. Ensure there is a back up of any valuable data you are responsible for. You can do this! Note that having the only copy of something you care about reside on just your laptop is considered by many to be irresponsible.

  • Ask your research group if they have a file share.
    • Many groups provide this service since since that's affords a great location to place copies of your precious research-related files.
  • Otherwise, automate your backups of unique, valuable data which resides only on your laptop to another location.
    • Periodically verify your backup automation is working as you intend. Do this so it's been done before you need to recover any data.

 

 

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