GitHub: the backup that isn't your laptop

GitHub is where your project goes to live on the internet. Think of Git (the save-point system) as local — it's all on your machine. GitHub is the remote copy. It's a backup, a collaboration space, and often the thing that triggers your website to go live when you upload new changes. If Git is your journal, GitHub is the safe deposit box where you keep a copy of every page.

Your laptop is not a backup strategy. Hard drives fail, coffee spills, and laptops get stolen. If your project only lives on one machine, one bad day can erase months of work. GitHub solves that by keeping a full copy of your project — every file, every save point, every note you've ever written — on servers that aren't going anywhere. Beyond backup, it's also how most deployment systems work: you push your project to GitHub, and your hosting service automatically picks it up and publishes it.

Create a free GitHub account. Connect your project. Then build one habit: at the end of every work session, push your latest changes to GitHub. It takes seconds and means you never have to worry about losing work. If you ever need to work from a different computer, you can pull the entire project down from GitHub and keep going exactly where you left off.

Any time you're working on something you'd be upset to lose. That's the bar. If your project matters to you, it should live in two places: your computer and GitHub. The small habit of pushing your work at the end of each session is cheap insurance against a very bad day.