
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupportgore
Back up your work! Bad things happen to good data all the time, and you never know when it could happen to you. Consider these best practices:
1) The very best practice is to follow the rule of "here, near, and far" by having a local copy that you're working on (like on your laptop), a nearby backup (like on a USB flash drive), and an offsite copy (like in cloud storage such as Google Drive or dropbox).
2) Backups only work if they're done regularly...it's useless to have a backup that's so out of date it can't recover your recent work. Whether it's once a day, once a week, or once an hour while you're actively working on a paper, be sure to save your work often!