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Years of journal data represent a valuable asset. Losing it to a failed drive or a deleted file hurts.

A simple backup routine takes minutes to set up. A cloud folder keeps a synchronised copy. A weekly export to an external drive provides an offline copy. A monthly archive stored separately protects against both accident and ransomware.

Version history helps when a formula is accidentally overwritten. Many cloud services keep previous versions for 30 days or more.

Platform statements deserve the same treatment. Broker statements, trade confirmations and account histories may be needed for disputes or tax purposes.

Naming conventions matter. Consistent file names, such as year-month-account, make retrieval easy.

The cost is negligible and the benefit potentially large. Data that took years to collect should not live in a single place.

Restoring a backup once, just to confirm the files open correctly, matters more than the backup itself, since untested copies often fail when needed.

Where does the journal data live here, and when was the backup last tested?

I lost about eight months of journal notes once when a laptop drive failed, and the worst part was that I thought I had a backup. The cloud folder was syncing, but the spreadsheet had been saved in a different folder after I renamed it, so the copy in the cloud stopped at the old version.

Now I keep everything in one folder that is the only place my journal lives, and that whole folder syncs to the cloud. Every Sunday I copy it to a small USB drive that stays in a drawer, and at the end of each quarter I make a zipped archive with the broker statements for that period.

The restore test is the part most people skip, and I did as well until last year. When I finally tried to open my archived files on another computer, two of the older spreadsheets had broken links to a second workbook. These days I keep each month's data self-contained so nothing depends on a file that might not be there.