I still shudder when I think of standing with my father curbside watching his laptop being carried away in the trunk of an anonymous city cab. We couldn’t chase the cab, we had no recollection of which cab company it was, and my dad had paid the driver in cash. Everything on his computer was instantly, mercilessly gone. All we could do was stand there and watch, slack-jawed.

That was a decade ago.

Just last week, I had a harrowing experience of my own: I spilled water on my laptop, completely destroying it. The Macbook Pro was pronounced dead on arrival at the Genius Bar.

I felt horrible and lamented my carelessness to my partner. He just shrugged and said, “thin client; no biggie.”

Familiar with my computing habits, he raised the point that had already spared me a lot of agony. All I actually lost (and all my employer lost, for that matter) was the machine itself.

While it is no small sum to purchase a computer, the machine alone is easily replaced. What is not easily replaced are original documents, spreadsheets, photos, audio files, video files, and the like.

I was actually able to resume work immediately on a borrowed machine, as if the accident never happened. That is because my files were, and are, safely nestled in the cloud. Clouds, actually: Dropbox and Google Drive, for the most part. I also use Evernote, Plaintext, and other free apps that allow me to update and synchronize files between my phone, computer, and tablet. These days, accessing and editing files in the cloud is so easy to do that it is flatly unnecessary to save anything outside of the cloud.

Every time I save a document in Dropbox, for example, I save the file just as I would save it to another folder on my computer

Dropbox and similar apps use pull technology to ensure that the cloud has the most current version of my files. When I am away from the office, I can review and edit my updated documents on my phone, my home computer, someone else’s computer, or any device that has a web browser.

Since my waterlogged experience last week, a number of people have shared their stories of losing every digital document when their computers went missing or bust. Family photos, personal documents, academic research…literally gone.

But those days are over for those who make the change!

If you only choose one cloud service, make it Dropbox.com. If you want to keep your notes with you everywhere, try Evernote. If you seek to collaborate on documents in real-time, with contributors in multiple locations, try Google Drive.

Moral of the story: store everything that matters to you in the cloud. That way, if someone else spills water on your computer, or you leave it in a cab (!), you won’t be faced with a total loss. Call it a small dent in the bumper. “No biggie.”