When I saw this title the first thing I thought was "AT", until I saw it was Renegade who created the thread
Of course, it's always a good idea to keep your most important stuff (and your personal stuff, and mods, shipsets etc.) on one or more backup CDs/DVDs. Updating these backups every once in a while will take some time, but you won't lose your data entirely the next time you have a..... situation like this.