I can’t state this enough: Backup your work, writers.

Backup. Your. Work.

Those of you who haven’t lost precious work due to hard drive failure, theft, or similar data loss, often have a hard time grasping the seriousness of the situation. But when you sit there, realizing that all your hard work is gone forever, then you know true despair.

Everyone should keep backups, and writers should keep more than most. There is no excuse, it is so easy. Not only can you use typical backup solutions like an external drive or a Time Machine, you can easily add additional layers of protection. Syncing to the cloud is obvious, sign up for Dropbox or similar this instance if you haven’t already.

I also keep a backup email account which get a copy of the day’s writing. Make it a habit to email your backup email account every day and you know you won’t loose more than a day’s work at least. Your backup email account need to be with a different provider than your primary one, of course.

Text doesn’t take much room. Back it up everywhere, keep an USB drive handy, backup to your FTP server. Whatever.

Just backup.