In 2018, a huge crowdfunded project nearly broke me. With all my work stored locally on my home-built PC, I feared the worst if something went wrong. Dropbox saved the day, and years later, it remains my go-to backup solution.

When catastrophe strikes, having your whole computer in the cloud makes recovery a breeze. I had all that work backed up—both for peace of mind and because it made working with collaborators breezier. In quick order, I built a trove of incredible artwork and complicated files.

The original goal was to make sure I wouldn’t lose any data in a worst-case scenario, so I set it up to mirror everything living on my work partition. Unfortunately, not once, but twice, my latest home-built PC chewed through two separate 2TB Samsung SSDs. It’s difficult to tell what went wrong with them, but each time, after some process-of-elimination testing, I learned that just the drive had gone bad and everything else in my system was A-OK.

My Dropbox bill is about £16 a month for a family plan, which includes up to six members. If you’re just in it for yourself, you can get it for £8.32 a month billed yearly (about £99 a year), which comes with 2TB of storage. You can upgrade to 3TB for around £119 a year.

I prefer Dropbox because the software works consistently well across multiple operating systems and is usually neither seen nor heard. The Windows client is snappy, and I’ve found that its real-time syncing is efficient and painless. After using it for about eight years now, I can’t recall a single time the service failed or faltered.