@littlest-lily said:
I’d love to back up locally but I’m not even sure how to do that since I don’t have Microsoft Office…
This article also rattled me when I found out about it. I don’t think there’s a straight alternative/dupe of Google docs that there’s a big consensus on.
If you’re just after a word processor, you’ve got things as simple as Notepad to something more feature-rich as Scrivener (it’s not free, but is a one-off payment and you can install on multiple devices). WordPad would have been my go-to if I didn’t have Word, but I believe it has been discontinued. LibreOffice Writer has also been rated quite well as a free processor that you can download and work on remotely.
It gets more complicated if you’re looking to collaborate and/or keep files saved on the cloud.
This person suggests a few options which could be worth a try. MS Word Online is also free to use and doesn’t require a subscription. For cloud storage alone, Dropbox is pretty reliable, widely used and the free storage tier would probably be adequate if it’s just for documents.