Section 2 · Working Practice

Backup

Definition

A copy of your working files kept in a second location, independent of the machine you work on.

Why it matters

A single copy is not a copy. Drives fail, laptops get stolen, and cloud sync can propagate a bad save as readily as a good one.

Example

Working locally, syncing to cloud storage, and periodically copying finished milestones to an external drive.

Note

Browser-based tools autosave; desktop applications do not. It’s easy to generalize from the one to the other and lose a week’s work — it happens to someone almost every term, usually around midterm.