TL;DR: Backing Up Your Masterpiece
If you follow the advice I lay out here, you should have a backup strategy in place that will protect you from pretty much anything.
To quickly summarise the advice:
- Have a backup on your computer, automatically generated by your application. You can use this to immediately undo something that happens to whatever work you have in progress.
- Keep a backup on a different disk - either a USB stick, external hard drive or something similar. Make sure your operating system (MacOS or Windows) creates and updates this automatically and regularly.
- Have a cloud backup - Backblaze is my recommendation, but bear in mind that Sync applications like Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive are not true backup solutions, though they can make your workflow a lot easier.
- Test your backups regularly! From time to time check that the files you expect to see are there, and do a download of one to make sure you know how to do it and that everything works as expected.
Following these simple steps (and really, the first three only need doing once!) will help ensure that your writing stays safe, no matter what the dangers.
Read on to get the details on how to do each of those steps, but it really is as simple as 1-2-3 (or rather, 3-2-1). Start here...
Happy writing!