My experience that burned the importance of backups into my brain happened well over 20 years ago.
Back then, hard drives with ~30GB were pretty much standard.
I wanted to make a backup using DVDs! I don’t remember why, but for some reason I had to remove the hard drive from the computer first.
And that’s when it happened. It slipped out of my hand and fell onto the hard tile floor.
Apparently so badly that the good old IBM 30GB hard drive no longer worked. Nothing, not a peep, no movement—nothing!
The hard drive contained all, ALL of my programming work from my education and private life. Most of it in C++, by the way.
Hundreds of hours destroyed forever and ever!
I spent hours trying to salvage something.
I was devastated. Looking back, I can understand why, but at the time, it wasn’t just the hard drive that broke, but also my ambitions to become a programmer.
I simply stopped programming…
Since that day, I have never failed to make proper backups, either privately or professionally as an administrator.