One cannot stress enough how important it is to take responsibility for your data.  This case falls well outside the realm of education, but highlights how skewed things can get when data is lost.  Think of the human and financial impact of this situation. 

To anyone working on their thesis or dissertation, make many copies of it.  Do NOT keep your only and primary copy on a thumb drive or one single computer.  We have seen more than one person lose months and even years of work thanks to highly efficient file keeping and single location storage strategies.  If your document is small enough (most word documents are) and it does not have sensitive information in it, email it to yourself, hopefully at multiple addresses.  That way you will always have a copy offsite, in essence, in a cloud.  Speaking of which there are many free cloud-based storage providers available.  Amazon Cloud Drive, iCloud, DropBox and many others offer basic free storage.  Save yourself from inevitable misery and take advantage of the free storage.

See: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/01/2569743/hialeah-killer-gets-new-trial.html