I take regular images (weekly in my case) of my primary hard drive and keep a copy of the image on my secondary hard drive.

I boot to floppy, a floppy created by the drive imaging program. from that I select restore Image (select the last one) and about 10 minutes later I’m up and running. I then restore my daily backup (sometimes mor frequently) of volatile data file, word docs, excel, OE database files, addressbook, favorites, etc. etc., another 2 minutes and I am very close to what I had before.

If I am going to do something that may have a great effect on my system, I usually take a fresh image before I apply the change/update, etc. If something goes wrong, then I revert to the image I just backed up.

So the worst case sceanario is I could lose upto 6 days of updates, tweaks, program settings and 1 days volatile data lose. But this is no great problem when compared to the other situation.

You need to have a backup strategy before something happens, rather than wish you had one when something happens.