Backups are great when disaster strikes. Especially nice for laptops are network-based backups. I once had a laptop hard drive fail in a hotel room within about 30 minutes of my completing 6 hours worth of work. I had literally just completed pushing the the backups over the network to my server when the machine locked up and gave physical drive errors on restart.
That’s the rare occasion, though. Many people don’t run backups as well as they should because it’s such a rare occasion. The more frequent use of backups though is recovering from mistakes or corruption. You know, accidentally deleting a file, for example. Most recently, I’ve had some problems with firefox plugins causing all my URL history and tab settings to get lost. For me, this is a big deal and the fact that I could recover Mozilla settings from yesterday or a few days ago really helps.
This is a huge part of why you should run backups.
Sean
