How to deal with students who lose their digital work? In my courses, students work on large, on-going projects, but submit some parts each week, showing their progress. All of the work is done on a computer or table.

Mid-semester, I always get reports from students of technical failures, e.g.:


Deleted entire project folder.
Reformatted hard drive or upgraded system without backup.
Sent computer to be repaired, cannot work on project until it returns.
USB not unmounted, files broken.
Device containing project folder lost or stolen.


I want to create a policy which is not so harsh as to turn all of these students away. At the same time, I worry if I am a little lenient, students will start claiming problems every time they forget to do their homework. What is a good policy that is not too harsh, recognizing that technical problems do happen, yet which cannot be too easily abused?
You should deal with them in the same way that you deal with students who claim to have lost non-digital work.  Here are two reasons:

This is not really any different from when students complained that &quot;the dog ate my homework.&quot;  Both paper and digital formats are susceptible to being damaged, lost, or destroyed.

They will not get any special exceptions from their boss when they lose important digital documents in a real job.


My students do most of their work in digital formats and I've never made special exceptions.  I suppose I would do so in some unusual circumstances (say, a university server where they were told to store their work had been hacked).
If you want to help them develop better digital work habits, introduce them to backups, Dropbox and/or version control.  But I don't think that is your job.