Keep everything local is a great strategy until your house burns down or your hard drive or SSD decides to end it’s own life.

I’m not saying that you should use one drive. I’m saying that you should have backups. If all you can get is cloud storage, then one drive might fit the bill. Maybe it won’t. I don’t know you or what you want from a backup.

I back up my files to a NAS on my lan, but I also use one drive and Google drive when I need to.

All I’m trying to say is: one drive isn’t necessarily the worst option. Raw dogging a single local storage drive as your only copy of the data you’re trying to hold onto, is much worse than one drive.

Other than that, I’ll just reiterate: back up your shit. And I want to add, check your bitlocker to see if it’s on. If it is, back up your recovery key to somewhere safe. Bitlocker, in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. I would argue that it’s best practice to have some kind of FDE, and bitlocker can achieve that. Just back up the recovery key, for the love of God.

Pro tip. “Print” the recovery to a PDF, then email that file to yourself. Quick and easy. The option to save your recovery key to a file, will not allow that file to be saved to the drive that it unlocks, but if you print it, you can save it as PDF without the same limitations. Just don’t leave it on the encrypted drive. Literally put it anywhere else. A USB drive, a NAS, an email, cloud storage, whatever you like. I’m not your boss.

Save yourself a metric fuckton of work, and/or lost data; back to your shit.