As some of you know, last week my computer's hard drive died a rather undignified death. I am one who backs up obsessively - all of my files the first of every month and my daily writing at the end of each day - so I lost absolutely nothing.
I know so many people to whom the word 'back-up' is something only done by vehicles. I pass this experience on as a cautionary tale.
Your words are precious. Save them, protect them, take care of them.
Yes, I send my stuff to myself, archive it in my gmail account. I also have five Sandisks. This is a religion! It's fucking sacred!
And what if your house burns down?
(cheery thought)
Meaning: you need something off-site, too.
Emailing files to someone else to store in their doc. files, mailing thumbdrive to someone else, etc.
Though I guess that gmail thing would work. I know I lost all of my archived emails (Outlook) when my last computer crashed...
Investigate Dropbox. The cloud is a savior, but DO NOT upload files quickly. Wait until each is successfully uploaded before you upload another. I did it the first time with irrational exuberance and opened my files on another computer later only to find them empty. Dropbox allows you to access anything on your hard drive from any computer anywhere. It feels odd to me, but it works.
I've used SugarSync for about two years now without any problems. Its free, backs up everything automatically and retrieving is simple. Had some problems with DropBox.
Well, and then there's Fictionaut; upload your stuff, make it private, et voila. There's the length limit of course, but for shorter stuff, it seems a good place to stash things, among its other virtues.