Why Every Writer Needs the Cloud

Two weeks ago, I succeeded in doing something I’d never done as a writer: I bricked my laptop. The technology angel choir sang a lament of death. The cloud, however, saved me.

The laptop I killed, to be fair, had had Windows 11 issues from the very beginning. But it was less than a year old. And to add insult to injury, my husband managed to void the warranty trying to dig in and fix it. (He’s an IT tech, by the way, and knows his way around.)

Now, I of course wanted to punch a wall understanding that I somehow was going to have to come up with another few hundred bucks outside of my budget to replace the dumb thing. But I didn’t freak out nearly as much as I could have.

Why?

Because the bulk of my work was saved in the cloud.

For some projects, I automatically turn to Google tools like Docs. Many of my other services, such as Canva and Office 365, also can save automatically. But no single tool gives me the exact functionality I need. So, I have to download quite a bit. To ensure I don’t lose material, once a week or so, I drag all of my downloads to a backup folder in the cloud. I also sync everything I can that’s in the cloud to an external drive. So, between the cloud apps and the drive, guess how much material I lost.

Zero.

Yes, I had to spend a bit of time getting my browser set up on my husband’s laptop. (He’s graciously letting me use his machine in the interim until I can get another one of my own.) But aside from that, I was able to pick up right where I left off. Had I worked strictly offline, it would have been an entirely different story.

So, the lesson you can take from all of this is, don’t depend on hardware. You need at least one physical drive to use as your cloud sync, because even third parties can have losses or even go bankrupt over time. But don’t rely on the machine you work on as your storage device, and use the cloud where you can to ensure you can work anytime, anywhere.

Photo credit:
MojanB from Getty Images