We’re into the home stretch of NaNoWriMo. Are you storing your manuscript on “the cloud”? You may want to reconsider. 
On October 31, hundreds of people reported that Google Drive ate their homework. During a window of 10 hours, documents were deleted or locked. Some people saw a message saying the documents violated Google’s Terms of Service. Other people saw no error, they just lost control of their own work. Google’s official position is the “glitch” (I really hate that word) was due to a code push. See https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-docs-lockout-its-fixed-google-says-but-users-fret-over-creepy-monitoring/ for more. This isn’t the first time such an event occurred and it won’t be the last. It should serve as a reminder to those of us who create content that we need to be mindful of who has ultimate control. If you store your work on someone else’s system, like the cloud, it isn’t you. My preference is to keep my work solely under my control. I also believe in backups, as in plural. Accidents happen but the odds of losing a computer hard drive, a full backup, and 2 or 3 thumb drives simultaneously are small. A virus could wipe out most of them in one fell swoop, of course, which is why all operating systems need protection (I’m looking at you, Mac users). This is also why, out of an abundance of caution, I print out each draft of my works in progress. Paper doesn’t crash. It’s also satisfying to see my accomplishments in a physical form. How do you save your work?
