Saving your work

You should not attempt to save any work to the vSmith Application server or Desktop computer. All information saved in non-approved locations will be lost when you log out or disconnect from the vSmith Application or Desktop. Use any of the methods described below. For students we recommend either of the first two options, setting up Terpdrive and using your Smith or University provided cloud storage, or saving the work directly to your own personal computer.

  • Terpdrive can be used to save work directly to Google Drive, Box, Dropbox or SkyDrive as long as you have connected your University account with the various services. See this page for more information. This is a great way to keep track of your work. Each MBA/MS Smith student has a Google Drive (via their UMD G Suite account) with unlimited storage and all University Students have 50Gb of Box storage. Undergraduates also have Google Drive through their Terpmail account, so set this up and make saving your work easy.

  • Save your work to your computer that you're using to connect to the vSmith Desktop or Application. You can set which local folders you would like to share with the desktop or application from the View Client settings or preferences window. By default in the Windows client it will offer to share to your Userprofile folder, and in the Mac client your Home library. You can add any other folder on your computer and share it with the desktop or application.






NOTE: You can share folders from your local computer to your vSmith Desktop even after you've started your vSmith session. That way you can save or open files to them by clicking the Options button on the tool bar (Preferences for Mac) and clicking the Share Folders option. You can then select the folders you'd like to see inside the vSmith desktop.


  • When you want to save your work in the Desktop or Application that you are using, start by doing the normal File > Save, and then browse to the folder(s) you shared. As shown to the right, the shared folder can be selected on your computer to save your work.

(Folders you have shared from your local computer will appear as Network Drives, starting with the letter Z. Files you save there are saved to your own local computer.)

  • Students (as well as faculty and staff) can save their work through any browser-based cloud storage, such as Google Drive (included with your UMD G Suite account with unlimited storage for MBA/MS students, or Terpmail for undergrads), Box (provided by the University with 50Gb of storage) or others of your own choosing such as Dropbox or OneDrive. You will need to take one minute to setup your cloud providers with TerpDrive for this to work. Any cloud provider you connect to your vSmith with TerpDrives/Kumo will show up as a network drive and all your files stored there will be visible to you.

  • You can also use a USB drive on Windows, Mac and supported Android devices to save your data.

  • For faculty and staff you can use your Smith K: drive where you can store your work documents securely. For work that others in your department need to access you can also save your work to the O:\ drive where you will find your shared departmental folder. The files you save to the K: and O: drive are backed up nightly. Please only store work-appropriate data to your K: drive. If you have a large number of files to store, use your departmental O: drive folder.

Also note that the Recycle Bin is disabled on desktops so you cannot recover a file if you delete it.

You should also save your work and log out when you have finished. Students are automatically logged off desktops if no activity is detected for 30 minutes so you will lose unsaved work. If you disconnect from a desktop without logging off first then you will also be logged after 5 minutes and will lose any unsaved work.