Yes - I can relate to all of this; especially when my XP laptop with 500GB of data files (MP3s, docs, VOBs, etc., etc.) on the two hard drives refused to reboot one day due to a severely corrupted registry. Luckily I had a small Notebook and Googled around the web for a solution. This lead me to a neat little app. called Linux Puppy. This ran in RAM only and booting with this gave me a working system. I could then copy all of my files - yes all of them incl. system files - onto a 1TB hard drive. So the files were saved. It then took me three months to rebuild the laptop - which alas is too old for Windows 7, so I had to put XP back on. Grrr.

On the necessity of corporates making backups I remember once at work we had a tour of the vast computer hall full of spinning tape drives and whirring disk drives. The guys there used roller skates to wizz around swapping tapes and hard disc packs between the library and the hall. It was a massive system called BABS for airline bookings. Anyway one day the whole system suddenly went down. It appeared that one of the guys had tripped over on his skates, put his hand out and inadvertently pressed a large unprotected red button on the wall. This was the emergency 'stop' button which brought the whole system to a crashing halt. Basically it cut the power. It took a few days to restore the system. Whether they had backups right to the point of failure I do not know. But manually checking in thousands of passengers using paper tickets is very time consuming, and there is no audit trail. It took weeks to recover from the crash. And the red button was fitted with a cover to stop it all happening again.