I email myself copies of my files pretty frequently... Especially after I write a large chunk. I do recall one time I wrote some kind of passage somewhere in NTN and, for the life of me, I couldn't find it later. Not now either. It just sort of vanished.... I'm guessing I had OpenOffice close incorrectly and when it auto-restored the file when I open the program again, it had auto-saved from a point far earlier - I'm talking like 20 30min earlier. So the entire passage was gone. I just rewrote it, but I remember that the dialogue from the first was better or flowed better. Shame. That still annoys me, specifically because I don't know what happened to that piece.
Maybe the story's better for it? Ah well.
Email yourself copies, backup on thumbdrives, backup on external drives, use Dropbox -- whatever helps you sleep at night. Do all of it.
One reason I email myself and back up to thumbdrives is specifically I was looking for like ch88 or something to grab a scene from and for some reason my files I had and had emailed myself didn't have THAT chapter. It had the start of it, and the parts before, and the files after, but not THAT chapter. I luckily had it on a thumbdrive, and at worse, could copy/paste rip it off DeviantART. But still.
