Ghosting refers to more than a hot date who suddenly pulls a disappearing act on you. Your work as a writer can disappear too.

Sometime in the ‘00s, saving copies of your writing in any shape or form became a thing of the past. After all, once you publish online—be it a freelance article for a news site or a blog post for a company landing page—digital ink is permanent, right?

Wrong.

Over my 15-year writing career, it’s likely that 95 percent of the articles I wrote have vanished from the Internet. Gone. Poof. Google turns up zilch.

Whether you’re a blogger, journalist or content creator, chances are you’ve been “Internet ghosted” at least a time or two. It’s not so much the dark web we have to fear as it is the disappearing web. Take me for instance:

• From 2006-2008 I was a daily reporter for two newspapers, but zero articles remain online. One paper deleted all its old articles after changing ownership; the other makes its archives inaccessible to non-paying subscribers.
• While in graduate school at the Missouri School of Journalism, I wrote for its school-affiliated paper with a circulation of 100,000. Some of my articles remain but are blocked by a paywall put up without warning, thereby making the links unusable as writing samples to prospective clients.
• In San Francisco I covered a tech conference and co-wrote a long-form blog post for its then-sponsor, wearableworld.com. Within six months the website rebranded as ReadWrite and removed any trace of wearable technologies. My contact there told me they had a “plan” to migrate older pieces but no timeline. Three years later and still nothing.
• Over the last decade, I’ve written articles and guest posts for numerous startup sites, ranging from travel tips to small business marketing strategies. Nearly all of those sites are now shut down, and my copy vanished along with them.

I have more examples but you get the point. Clearly this is a trend.

So next time your writing is published, don’t leave fate in the hands of a webmaster. Reprint articles on your personal blog and be sure to list or link to the original source. Print them out the old-fashioned way and store for your records. Or, if you don’t want to kill trees, save them as PDFs and email the PDFs to yourself. While you’re at it, if you still write rough drafts in Word as opposed to a cloud-based app, get in the habit of emailing drafts to yourself at the end of the day.

If not, a day may come when you suddenly need to dig up your work—to add to your LinkedIn profile, attach to a job application, or simply show off to a loved one—only to find that its been erased from (virtual) existence.

You can’t control what happens after you swipe right on Bumble, but you can control what happens to your writing. Don’t leave it to a ghost of a chance.

A version of this article also appears on LinkedIn.