Picture it: August of 2025.

A writer is pouring her soul into the 6th chapter of her fantasy novel. The flow is electric, the characters vibrant, and the story pulses with life.

The writer works until she reaches the end of the chapter, then saves and logs out to go about her day.

A few days later, she’s ready to begin writing chapter 7. She opens up her document and starts getting back into the groove of things. However, when she tries to refer to chapter 6 for a detail, she makes a horrifying discovery.

Chapter 6 has vanished.

As you can imagine, the writer was devastated. She’d lost one of her best chapters to the abyss, and there was no way she could ever rewrite it the same way.

And, as you can ALSO imagine, that writer was me.

I looked EVERYWHERE for that missing chapter, but no amount of “undo,” “restore,” or praying to the computer gods could return it to me.

It sucks, but it did remind me of a valuable lesson that EVERYONE needs to know:

BACK UP YOUR FILES!

And not just in your main program, either. You need a separate, unique place to keep a copy of your work —that way, if/when the dreaded loss happens, you can go to your backup and easily replace what you’ve lost.

For example, since I use Atticus to write my fantasy project, I now have a backup file on Google Docs. Therefore, whenever I finish a writing session in Atticus, I immediately copy the content and paste it into my backup file. Then, I triple save EVERYTHING!

There’s no greater pain than losing hours of hard work, and I hope my cautionary tale can serve as a warning and a reminder to all you creatives out there.

You NEED a backup of your work. Maybe several.

That way, you never need to feel the pain and frustration I feel at having to redo one of my best chapters- especially since it’s the one thing keeping me from the rest of the story.

Learn from my mistake. Backup your files.

For another version of this story (and to see my frustration), check out the video!

@ladyerynn

BACK. IT. UP. #tuesdaytips #booktok #authorsoftiktok #writingtips #backup

♬ original sound – Erynn Crittenden 📚🖊