As a freelancer, your documents are important. Samples, works in progress, work that needs to be corrected, all of them could disappear in a flash. If your computer fries or a virus wipes everything off, this can spell disaster. And if you’re writing and lose your work before saving, that can be a problem as well. Fortunately, there are a few precautions you can take to avoid this from happening.

Always back up your work. It sounds like a common sense thing, but so many forget to do it. Put it on a cloud storage, email it to yourself, do whatever it takes so that it can be retrieved in case if it’s lost. If you don’t trust your documents being online, there are physical ways you can store it. Just a one gigabyte flash drive can store most of your Word documents comfortably. Always make sure to keep track of that as well so it doesn’t get lost. Put it in a drawer, or on your car keys.

If you’re writing a storm and suddenly something happens to prevent you from saving, this can be extremely frustrating. The common sense solution is to save all of the time, but sometimes that can break the flow of your writing. However, there are ways to autosave often. For instance, Word has an autosave feature, and the frequency of which it saves can be adjusted. For some writers, losing ten minutes of writing is a downfall. If something happens, the document can be recovered once you open Word. If you don’t see it, don’t fret just yet. For a Word document, search through your hard drive by typing in “.asd.,” which is the autosave document’s extension. Sometimes it can be retrieved from the bowels of your computer.