Backing up your work

Your code only exists on your laptop until you put it somewhere else. If the laptop dies, the work dies with it. This doc covers the easy ways to stop that from happening.

What most people use

GitHub (recommended)

Version control plus cloud backup plus auto-deploy trigger (if you connect Netlify / Vercel / Cloudflare Pages to the repo).

• github.com — free private repos

Synced cloud folders

If you refuse to learn any Git, keep the project folder inside a synced cloud folder (Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive). Cloud provider handles the backup. Tradeoff: no version history with commit messages, sync conflicts on node_modules. Usually you want to exclude node_modules from sync.

Ask your AI

First-time setup, once:

I want to back up this project on GitHub. I do not have a GitHub account yet. Walk me through, one step at a time:

1. Creating a GitHub account.
2. Creating a private repo for this project.
3. Getting the project up there (you can run the commands).
4. Confirming it is safe.

Every day use, once you are set up:

Save my changes to GitHub and push.

The AI runs git add, commits with a sensible message, and pushes. You never type a Git command.