The 1 Thing to Worry About
It's not getting hacked. It's losing data you can't recover.
Claude is a brilliant, fearless assistant with no memory of what you care about. It will write code, run commands, and delete files — all at superhuman speed — with zero sense of what took you months to build. It's not careless, it just doesn't know. That's your job. Here are the 2 things to protect, and the dead-simple habits that do it.
Your code — save it to GitHub
Source code is everything Claude writes for you: the HTML, the JavaScript, the styles, the config files. Think of it as your app's recipe. GitHub is a free website where you store that recipe online — every version, every change, forever. Lost your computer? Download it again. Claude broke something? Roll back to yesterday. If you're not using it yet, setting it up is one of the first things worth doing.
Haven't set up GitHub yet? Just ask Claude:
I don't have GitHub set up yet. Help me create a repository for this project and push my code to it so everything is backed up online.Your data — invisible to GitHub
Now here's what GitHub never touches: everything that happens while your app is running. User accounts. Uploaded photos. Messages. Orders. Comments. This is your app's content — created by real people, stored in a database. GitHub has never seen a single byte of it. If it disappears, there's no undo.
Claude doesn't know the difference between a test database with fake data and your real one with 6 months of real users. It just follows your instructions. Protecting your data is your job — not Claude's.
One habit for each
Two categories, two habits. Once these are in place you can let Claude move as fast as it wants.
Most apps built with Claude use Postgres or Supabase (Supabase is just Postgres with a nice dashboard on top). Either way, your data lives in tables — user rows, orders, messages — and none of it is in GitHub. Supabase has built-in daily backups you can turn on in a few clicks. For Postgres, a simple dump script is enough. You don't need to set it up yourself — just ask Claude.
Ask Claude to set it up for you:
I'm using [Supabase / Postgres]. Help me set up automatic daily backups of my database so I don't lose any user data if something goes wrong.