Moving Files between Home and School

E-mail Attachments

You can send work home and back to school via e-mail (e.g. Hotmail) by sending yourself an e-mail with an attachment.  This is pretty reliable, and you don't need to carry anything with you that could get lost or broken.  If you have a Yahoo account, you can store up to 1 GigaByte (1000 MegaBytes) in your E-mail.  Some e-mail accounts limit attachments to 1 or 2 MegaBytes.  An essay containing lots of pictures might be too big.  And if the Internet connection is down, you cannot get your file(s).

USB Stick

A USB Stick (or flash drive) is small and durable and fits in your pocket.  A typical USB stick stores 256 MegaBytes and costs about 25 EU (more space if you pay more).  You might fill this up, but it will take a long time - or lots of MP3 downloads And you are unlikely to find any files that are too big to fit into it.

USB Sticks are very fast, storing up to 5 MegaBytes per second.  That makes it 100 times faster than a floppy diskette, and about 10 times faster than an Internet connection (e.g. your E-mail).   A USB stick is  reliable and hard to break.  It is definitely the big winner when considering convenience.

Disadvantages?  USB Sticks are easy to lose and cost 10-20 Euros to replace.  And compatibility can be a problem - they work in most computers, but not always.  Some sticks require installation - this might not be possible at school, where students cannot install software.

FIS Server

At FIS, you can store essays on the Z: drive in your personal account.  This server is available at home by connecting to http://www.fis.edu/home , and logging in.  This is a very convenient service for transferring files.  It only requires an Internet connection at home, as the server is located at school.

Floppy Diskettes

A diskette holds 1.44 MegaBytes of data.  That's 1.44 MILLION bytes.  A byte holds a single letter, so that is over a million letters.  That's enough space for lots of essay.  But pictures take a lot more space than text - a typical .JPEG picture is around 50 KiloBytes, so 30 pictures would fill up your floppy.  

Floppy diskettes are cheap to buy, but you don't get much.  For 10 Eu, you can buy 20 floppy diskettes and store 30 MegaBytes of data.  But a USB stick for 10 Euros holds 1 GigaByte (1000 MegaBytes).  So the USB stick is actually cheaper in the long run, and a lot more convenient.

And nowadays, there are lots of PCs with NO floppy drive - bad luck!

Web-Server Storage

If you have a web-site (e.g. Geocities), you can upload a file to the web-server and download it later. This is pretty convenient.  But just like E-mail, it requires a reliable Internet connection. At Yahoo you get 1000 MB space in your e-mail, but only 30 MB at Geocities.  

But what if my file is broken?  [More]