The Girl’s Guide to Law School has a continuing series of posts tagged Surviving Law School 101: What You Need to Know to Succeed. The author has some excellent advice on surviving the first year of law school, including class preparation, outlining, and thinking about exams from the very first class. The most recent post titled 5 Non-Obvious Things to Do When You Start Law School includes this very important piece of advice

Set up automated backups on your laptop. Seriously, if you only do one thing before law school starts, do this. Have you ever lost years of work in a hard drive crash? It’s a nightmare. Imagine you’re a week from exams, and your computer dies, taking EVERYTHING you worked on all semester with it. DO NOT let this happen to you. Go to Dropbox right now, and sign up for the free version. Make a folder called “Law School” and add it to your Dropbox. Save every file you create in law school there. Presto, problem solved. You can thank me later. (I don’t care if you use Dropbox, but it is really easy. Use whatever you like, but do something. I’m paranoid enough now that I back up to Dropbox and to an external hard drive, but that’s probably overkill.)

Excellent words of advice. There are other options, including saving to your Pace network drive, using an external hard drive or USB drive, and some free cloud-based solutions (iCloud, Google Drive, and Amazon Cloud Drive) that are all as easy to use as Dropbox.