Far too many times have I witnessed a writer lose everything they’ve worked on over months of blood, sweat, and tears. It happened a couple of years ago on Writer’s Cafe with the Great Delete. Several writers hadn’t backed up their poems and stories, not even in a Word doc on their computers. That just boggles the mind. The site crashed (we still aren’t certain what exactly happened) and everyone’s writing disappeared overnight. During the time of that Great Delete, I worked at the junior high school and ran the Writer’s Club. Most of my kids lost everything. Now, I learned my lesson years ago when a floppy disk I had decided it wanted to reformat (yes, this was before flash drives/jump drives came along), but luckily my husband at the time was a computer geek and was able to save my file. That file was my first novel, which will never see daylight and probably would have been better off getting deleted, but that’s not the point. I have since backed up everything to two or three separate places.
The beauty of the internet is that there are several places online that offer free storage. Some internet providers even offer storage for your data. I know mine does, but I don’t use it. The link below is a referral to the place I use, Mozy. Sharon Gerlach, my partner in crime and Forever Nocturne, referred me. By doing so, it gave her extra space. There is no catch. You just sign up. They have a special offer running right now. If you choose to take a look at it, go to the right of the page and look for the free storage offer under “Home Users.” It’ll be worth it.
Good luck and keep those files backed up daily, especially if you’re writing every day.
jinxiesworld.com 
This reminds me of a disaster which happened at Sydney University, which went down in history as The Great Head Crash of '79. In those days the computing department had precisely 2 computers (yes, it was that long ago…). Of course they did a regular backup, but they only made 1 copy, always to the same backup tape. That was their downfall. The research computer decided to have a major head crash at the very moment backup was underway. The tape system dutifully recorded the dying screams of the hard disk, precisely overwriting the only backup copy. Everything was lost, including PhD research.After that, they made two copies of everything.
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