Save your work and your BitLocker Recovery Key!
Technology breaks. Sometimes it is wear and tear, others may be power related, but more often than not I find it is human error. This is why there are practices to backup work and software, and provide redundancy in servers, services, and storage. Cloud automation has even made processes to recover from these failures possible in seconds rather than hours, days or worse. One might think a 20+ year seasoned developer would always take protections. Well this one, your author, became a little too comfortable and lazy.
I worked long and late hours on a refactor and exploration of angular architectural design using SOLID principles - milestone 1 was very much a proof of concept and poorly written. Uncertain of my direction and the incomplete state I left it in at 04:00 I decided not to muddy up my git branch.
***Note, if you every find yourself thinking this way, slap yourself and yell an expletive (or if you are a trying to keep your language clean yell "expletive"). Then do the right thing, commit and push your work; if you are really concerned about muddying a branch, then branch your branch.
So, a little shut-eye later I decided to distract myself with a little USB-C failure restricting my working environment to 1 monitor. Eventually I found myself tinkering with a limited set of settings in the BIOS. One of those settings was resetting security (spoiler alert in comes human error). Sure, type in number and hit enter. Interesting, must be important, don't over think it. Reboot. Nice looking blue screen is requesting my BitLocker Recovery Key...
...insert dramatic pause for effect...
...drop blood pressure, pail face, nausea...
Yup, I just realized not only was I going to spend the day restoring all software (My image is on my other hard drive which is also encrypted), I also lost my previous day of work. And no, I did not recall ever saving my keys and neither did my Microsoft live account.
Fortunately, despite my failing memory, I found that I had stored my keys in my offsite backup location. Oh, what a relief! After punching in my key and signing into Windows, I branched my previous work and pushed the changes to a remote server.
ProTip: Encrypt your disks. It adds a layer of security in the event the drive becomes inoperable or disposed of in the future. Drive wiping is also encouraged; however, SSDs use wear level technology making it difficult to guarantee a complete wipe of data.
tl;dr
If it is important to you make at least one offsite copy in some form. I personally use iDrive.
Developers push your work to remote servers often. If you aren't sure you want to keep it put it in another branch.
Everyone, put a copy of your encryption keys in a safe place.