[cd34]

I can tell you from personal experience that Time Machine was worth its weight in gold.

Laptop drive died, took it to the apple store, they said, yep, its the hard drive. Bought a new drive, installed MacOS from the dvd, partway through the process, Hey, I notice an old Time Machine backup, do you want me to restore that? 40 minutes later, my laptop was back to where it was 18 minutes before the crash. I opened firefox and it realized it had crashed and reopened the bookmarks.

According to the survey, 14.2% don't even know if their current webhost does backups.

On my linux laptop, I did back up to a storage server which kept generational copies - certainly not as pretty as Time Machine, but, just as functional.

Backups are extremely important and you can get simple one-touch backup drives that hook up to USB/Firewire. A quick rule of thumb is, back up only as frequently as you want remembering how much time it will take to reconstruct since your last backup.

Data Recovery tools today are pretty good -- you might be able to try one of those $49-$99 recovery programs if the drive is still spinning and its only a data error that ruined the fat tables or some other disk structure. If the drive is spinning, most of those recovery programs can recover it. If not, ontrack.com and dozens of other companies can do the data recovery, but, its quite pricey.