The direction is simple. It is repeated over and over as you master this tool of your craft. We know that we have to do it, and are reminded constantly. Sometimes it is even automatically done for us with out our even knowing…
BACK UP YOUR FILES!!!
General I am pretty good about this, especially anything to do with my writing. I back that up in multiply ways; flash- drive, the cloud, separate computer.  Losing hours of writing is a writers worst nightmare (other than writer’s block) and we all take extra care of our manuscripts.

It’s the everyday things that you forget about.  If you’re like me you click the “remind me” button because you just don’t want to take an extra 5 seconds to let the program back itself up.  Instead, you just keep adding more and more information.  Well, today my taking shortcuts came to bite me in the butt.  I lost all my contacts in my iPhone and had that instant moment of panic and devastation: I had everything in there: phone numbers, addresses, birthday, private notations, codes and directions.

Lucky for me some really good friends were able to walk me through a few steps and I was able to restore an older version which saved about 90% of the information (thanks guys!)

So I’ve learned a valuable lesson, and I promise to back up my files every time I pause in my work or every time my computer promotes me

…until I forget again and it ignore so that I can keep writing!