Backing up your work is an essential part of working successfully
with computers. Things do go wrong -- your job is to develop airtight working habits
so that when things go wrong, you don't loose your work as a result.
One of the challenges of using good back-up procedures is that things don't go wrong
all the time -- only when you're least ready for it (or so it seems). So, if you wait for the computer to teach you the importance of this, it
will almost always be a painful lesson. Much better to develop good backup habits for
their own sake, so when the lesson comes, you're all ready for it.
Without good backups, your work is vvery vulnerable. With good backups, your work
can be much more secure than, for instance, a sheet of drawings on paper,
since any one copy of your work can be
destroyed without destroying your work itself.
Good backup habits protect you against a wide range of possible pitfalls, including
computer crashes while you're working, disk crashes while you're not working, natural disasters,
like a rain-drenched backpack, and anthropogenic disasters, like a stolen backpack.