File Back-Ups [or, why storing something in only one place is bad]

I know we talked about technology recently, but we're going to do it again. So you can learn from me - and learn what not to do.

BACK UP YOUR SH*T.
(Pretend you can hear me saying that in a sassy-yet-authoritative voice - because that's the correct tone for this)

Let me preface with some backstory.
I do something called dual booting with my computer. I run Debian as my main operating system, and have a copy of Windows that I use for gaming. I stay in Debian 85% of the time, and switch over to Windows whenever I want to play Rift or Elder Scrolls Online or whatever. This means that I'm not actually in my Windows partition very often. Which means if something were to randomly die in it, it would take me longer to find out.
Well, this past Wednesday, it died.

I wanted to play ESO, so I booted into Windows. And it froze up hardcore after loading. I got Elder Scrolls to load, but I couldn't play, then couldn't close it, then couldn't close anything, so I restarted. Second time, couldn't get anything to work after it finished loading the operating system up.

Uh-Oh. 
Lucky for me, I don't use Windows that much, and had no files on it to worry about being salvaged from over there (which I could grab from my Debian partition, anyway, if need be).

Then I had a moment of even greater Uh-Oh, because my Windows partition runs from my storage drive. Which I have had for the past, oh, five years? And it has pictures and movies and music and, well, everything on it. I rely on that drive, and if it was on its last leg, I was going to be in trouble.

I spent a good four hours or so Wednesday night pulling files from that drive to a spare hard drive. A lot of it was stuff I just didn't need any more, or it would have taken much longer, but there were also a ton of pictures that I don't have saved anywhere else.
And that is NEVER smart.
If the drive had just died outright, I would be out of a lot of memories that are not get-back-able.

But I would have also been out of a lot of useful things - planner printables, crochet patterns, tax return documents, the last chiptunes EP I downloaded (chiptunes is great, by the way), and it goes on and on.
These things aren't life shattering to lose, but I would be rather sore to lose them all as well.

What could have solved my panic? Having all this stuff stored in some other location as well, be it on a back-up drive, or in the cloud, or even just on a flash drive hidden away somewhere (so far as the photos go, not needing as-easy of access to them).

I'm hoping that the storage drive all this came from is salvageable, but it is old, and mechanical hard drives don't last forever (they can, sure, but they are rated to only last for x-amount of time if you are using them often, which I am).
If not, everything that I didn't grab off of it will be gone (I'm out of extra space elsewhere at this point, sadly).
I was lucky enough that the drive isn't completely dead, and I was actually able to pull things off without any hassle, and I'm hopeful those files are not corrupted (so far everything seems fine).

But what if I hadn't of found out until it was dead? I would be a miserable heap. 

Don't be a miserable heap, back up your files.
There are enough free solutions that there really is no excuse. I thought it was going to be fine without, but that is obviously not the case.
It's easy to say "oh, my hard drive will last forever", which may be the case, but do you really want to find out if it is? I don't want to play this game again, transferring files for hours waiting for something to say it can't copy (or just not being able to copy any more at all!) is no fun.

~Havok

P.S. Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, etc, are these free solutions I speak of. They may not be a ton of storage, but they are free, and you can pay for any extra space you need. And as I mentioned, storage hard drives and flash drives are the next option. A bit more pricey, but you will have access to your things without internet access. There are many more technical options as well, but I don't know enough about NAS storage to talk about it.

P.P.S. After a few days, I tried to access files on the dead drive again, just in case...and some folders didn't even show that they had contents. It's toast. The good news is, I've a fresh install of Windows on a spare solid state drive from the Mister, and a new storage drive, which I've already installed ESO on. And, the files I managed to save are free of issue. So, while everything turned out alright, still something you never want to deal with!