I have a laptop - Will you back it up?

Short answer: "No. We are not the group to contact for laptop support. Please contact FAS for laptop support." There are many layers to computing at Harvard, that is not a part of our duties. We provide a services infrastructure for all and a limited number of supprted 'terminals' for a few (staff, G1, G2, emeritus).

Longer answer: "No, but we do back up everything in your Physics home directory every night. If you store you data there, it's backed up."*
And every Physics user has space on our file servers.
See this section for information about connecting to your Physics home directory.

The long answer means you still need to copy your data to our server, but this is something the average computer user is capable of.
You can copy the data directly (see link above) or you can use a backup program to make an archive to copy over. Windows has a backup program built in, Mac users have several freeware choices, and there are numerous commercial applications for both platforms. Please keep in mind that this does not mean you can back up your entire computer. Your disk space is limited to the amounts show below. They are very generous quotas by most standards, but still below the size of the average hard disk. If you need to back up your entire machine (a good idea, but at the very least you should be backing up your documents, etc.), then you should consider backing up to CD, DVD or to an external hard drive. Again, many solutions exist.

Check your Physics disk quota here

* - We don't even back up the machines we directly support. It's not worth it (staff, G1, G2, emeritus). That's because when a user logs in to our domain, all data is stored in the user's home directory and not on the machine. Our machines are interchangeable and 'locked down'. If one dies, we just replace it and move on. (This is why you can log into any computer in the library, for instance, and still have all your files.) Portable devices make this impossible; we can't lock them down. Being a staff of only 2 against tens of thousands of viruses and exploits, this is why we are unable to support laptops.