The risk is real and predictable
Over four years, something will happen: a laptop dies or is stolen, a drive fails, a file corrupts, a phone with your only photos of a whiteboard goes in a lake, a document you worked on for six hours does not save. The students this wrecks are the ones with one copy in one place. It is entirely preventable.
The rule: three copies, two places, one off-site
Keep your work in at least: the place you edit it (your laptop), a synced cloud copy that updates automatically (the university-provided cloud storage — it is free, large, and included), and ideally a third — an external drive you update weekly, or a second cloud account. If any one location vanishes, you have lost nothing.
Turn on automatic cloud sync now
Put your coursework folder inside the university cloud drive so every save syncs within seconds, with version history you can roll back. This is the highest-value step and it is a one-time setup. Do not rely on manually copying files to the cloud "when you remember" — you will not remember the time it matters.
Version history beats a single backup
The university cloud storage and the document tools keep previous versions, so you can recover the draft from before you deleted three pages, not just the latest save. Know how to open version history in the tools you use. This has saved more papers than hardware backups have.
Do not keep the only copy on a flash drive
USB flash drives fail without warning, are easy to lose, and are the most common single point of failure in a lost assignment. Use one for transfer if you must, never for the only copy. The same goes for the only copy being an email draft or a single phone.
Special cases
Large project files (video, CAD, datasets, code) may exceed cloud limits — use a departmental server or a lab drive plus an external disk, and for code use a version-control repository, which is a backup and a history in one. Photos of whiteboards and lab notebooks should auto-upload from your phone. If you lose work anyway, the Technology Help Desk can sometimes help with recovery — but only if there was somewhere to recover from.
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. Every office, person, building, phone number and statistic on this page is invented; nothing here describes a real institution or a service you can actually contact.