Most of us have been there at one point or another in our computing lives: you press the power button on your computer and wait innocently for the friendly face of your operating system to appear. As long the long seconds drag by, confusion sets in, then disbelief, and finally the creeping red fingers of rage. Where once you saw your wallpaper, there’s now a black abyss. The only sound you hear is a sickening string of clicks. Your computer is dead, and it just took five years of your writing with it to the grave…

On the short list of devastating emotions, the helplessness that accompanies data loss must be somewhere near the top. The good news is that unlike death and taxes, having years of your hard work vanish in a poof of fried electrons is wholly preventable. While no backup system is 100% foolproof, the law of averages can be your best buddy when skirting disaster. The more copies of your work you place in varied locations, the exponentially better your chances of getting it all back in case of a catastrophe. I use a three-pronged system to back up my own writing:

Copy the files onto another hard drive. External hard drive prices are going nowhere but down. For a small cash outlay, you can buy enough drive storage to back up the library of congress. No kidding, even a smallish hard drive will likely hold everything you will ever write for the rest of your life. Buy a second hard drive, plug it in, and use it. A lot of external drives even come with software to automatic backups, allowing you to copy whole folders or drives at the touch of a button. A word of caution about memory sticks and so-called “thumb drives”—they can and do fail, often more frequently than conventional hard drives. If you back up to one of these devices, you definitely want to use the steps below as well.

Store files off-site. That warm, slightly smug feeling you get from backing up to your external drive can be zapped in a nanosecond. All it takes is for something unexpected and evil to happen to your computer, like a rogue power surge. Having two or more drives go belly-up in a heartbeat is a very unlikely scenario, but not impossible. As a backup to your backup, I recommend storying your files on a free online storage service. My current favorite is Dropboks. Not only do they allow you to store up to 1 Gigabyte for free, but they’ve got hands-down the simplest and most intuitive interface I’ve ever seen. Now losing your work takes not only the demise of your own computer, but the simultaneous destruction of their systems as well. Bloody unlikely.

Email files to friends. The idea couldn’t be simpler: every few days, wrap up whatever you’ve been writing lately, attach it to an email, and send to a fellow writer or two. Words don’t take up much room, so it’s hardly an imposition. The handy thing about friends who are also writing buddies is that you can arrange an exchange of files on a regular basis. You save their bacon, they save yours. The whole process takes only a minute or two to accomplish, and your writing is safe in the event of all but a major planetary crisis.

Having completed all three steps above, all that’s left is to lay in a few pallets of bottled water and a dozen cases of Spam, and you’re golden. So how about you—what’s your plan for averting disaster?