It’s very important to me that my writing projects are backed up regularly, securely, and easily. Whenever I start writing, whether it is a short story or a novel, I save the file in Dropbox so that it automatically gets backed up. That way if something happens to my computer, like the hard drive fails or it gets stolen, all of my writing is backed up to a separate and accessible location.
I have used Dropbox for years and haven’t had any issues, but other file syncing and backup services probably work just as well. The free tier of Dropbox has 2 GB of storage, which is plenty of storage for writing projects. Hooray for text files being small in size!
I also have an external hard-drive that I plug into my laptop at my desk that automatically backs up the entire hard drive using Time Machine, the built-in Mac OS backup utility. If something happens to Dropbox and my laptop, it feels reassuring to have a physical device in my home that I can use to get the file. This extra layer of backup may be unnecessary, but redundancies are important when it comes to backing up digital files.
I don’t think backing up one’s writing needs to be any more complex than that. It doesn’t require emailing files to oneself or using a flash drive. All it requires is setting up a syncing service or an automatic backup utility—or, better yet, both.