Now that you’ve put all your important pieces of paper online, think (and more importantly, feel) what it would be like to lose it all.  Maybe you drop your computer, or someone steals it, it’s lost in a fire, or the hard drive crashes unexpectedly, right in the middle of you using it.  Feel your frustration, your anger and your fear.  All that data, all those pictures, all those personal papers, completely lost forever.  That’s nothing you can do about it.  Nothing.  All gone.  You’re devastated as you try to figure out your next move, but there really isn’t one.

Let those emotions set in and wait a moment before you read the next paragraph.

Now, feel the relief you have because you know that you backed up everything in the cloud.  Between the two feelings, this one is better, isn’t it?

I use Dropbox to continuously back up my computer, but there are plenty of other backup services that do pretty much the same thing.  I can’t stress enough how important it is to back up your entire computer to a cloud-based service, so that, if the worse happens, you can just download your saved items onto your new or repaired computer with nothing lost.  If you don’t know how to do this, ask someone who does, and please get it done.

• Buy a service like Dropbox for your computer and install it.

• Back up all your files.

• Ask a knowledgeable friend to look at what you did to make sure you really did back up all your files and that they can be restored elsewhere.