A couple of months ago, my laptop failed during what I assumed was a routine system update. The Blue Screen of Death just as I was editing, almost sent me into a panic attack.

Fixing the laptop and recovering the entire system took a couple of hours, but the stress didn’t last more than a couple of minutes.

Why was I able to get over the problem so fast?

Once the initial panic subsided, I realized that everything I was currently working on and most of my previous work has been safely stored in the cloud.

My corporate job provided me with a discount to the Office365 this year, so I was happily using OneDrive this year and all my past projects were stored in Dropbox.

Which meant that even if I had to re-format my hard drive completely, to fix the system issue, before reinstalling everything, none of my writing would be lost.

I can’t even imagine the heartbreak and panic attacks I would go through if almost a decade worth of writing got lost to a technical malfunction…

I cannot stress this enough: back up your work. There are numerous services. Those I use right now, or used in the past: Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive. I think Apple has their cloud as well (never had an Apple product in my life, so I can’t be sure…)

I haven’t been following this advice early on in my adventure with writing, even though all my elders kept telling me to BACK UP MY WORK. As a result, some of my fanfiction, or early, abandoned drafts will forever be lost. But that was when you had to have an external hard drive or a whole lot of USB sticks. Ever since cloud storage became a thing, I sleep soundly knowing my work is backed up the second I hit “save” in my document. Hell, with OneDrive, and Office’s integrated autosave my documents get saved as I write them up. It awesome.

The cloud is doing wonders for my sanity and peace of mind. So, remember kids: BACK UP YOUR WORK.