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RE: Protect Yourself From Disappearing Posts and Comments!
Sage advice... everybody heed this! I got in the habit back at the DDoS attack and things seems to have been a little wonky ever since, so I keep copying everything... including comments... before I try to post them.
Having been a writer for decades I always write my original documents in a word processing program. For the last several years I've used Libre Office. Every bit as good as Word AFAIC ... and free!! Find it. Download it. Learn to use it. OMG!! http://www.libreoffice.org
I would never dream of trying to compose something in Markdown! Back in the early days of computers, I would even print out all my documents so that I could retype one if something went wrong -- with a disc (remember floppies??) or with my computer program. (My then-husband started me out on WordPerfect, which was an absolutely horrible program, notorious for screw-ups during "automatic background save" -- the system would freeze, and notorious, too, for the BSOD for absolutely no reason whatsoever.)
I developed the habit in those days of hitting Ctrl+S every time I even pause to consider my next word or phrase. It's second nature to me now, and I have never been sorry. I haven't lost more than a sentence or two in a document in years. Not even in the unexpected power outages we have here in our very rural location! (I've tried to get my now-husband to develop this habit, but he won't listen. He has fixed ideas in his head about how computers should work ... and he won't adjust his reality to accommodate how they really do work. So, I just tune out the background swearing and go on with my life.)
Since coming to Steemit, I've also begun writing my comments on a saveable page in Libre Office ... because when I have something to say, I can go on and on and on. (Can you tell?) And losing something I spent more than 15 seconds writing is not a risk I'm willing to take. I, too, learned "the hard way" back when disasters really were not my fault. Online as in nature, your ability to survive depends on your ability to adapt, and anything you can do to insure your safety is time and effort well spent. Those few minutes you save when you make it easy on yourself will be lost many times over with your next major disaster. Make disaster recovery / disaster prevention one of your missions in life.
In those early days I also learned how much I loathed having to recompose a lost document that I'd already written. They were never as good the second time around (for some reason) ... and I can remember several times when I just shrugged and moved on, leaving the essay lost forever.
I once read a biographical piece on Hemingway that told of how he lost the finished manuscript of his very first novel in a briefcase he forgot and left on a train. Though I never much cared for Hemingway's writing, even I could empathize with the devastation of that moment. The cheapest, most valuable education you can ever gain is learning from other people's mistakes. I learned from his. (Backups, backups, backups of your backups.) Learn from this one. It's the greatest gift you'll give yourself as a writer ever!!
If you prefer a plain-text editor, which I use to format html or to format FOR Markdown -- using their styling, here are two free options:
http://www.notetab.com -- for Windows -- the one I prefer
https://kate-editor.org -- originally for Linux, now also available for Windows (honestly, I use them both)