I absolutely agree, and it's the philosophy that I employ -- frequently involving multiple hard drives and boots such that it's a transition rather than a single moment in time.

I got burned by it the last time though -- nuked and lost some important source code. Turned out to be a good thing, since, like everything else, the source code was accumulating crap, and starting from an earlier backup forced me into a much more streamlined design.

How could I have possibly overlooked that directory? I didn't. It's a delightful property of Visual Basic to save stuff ALL OVER THE PLACE, hence several key libraries were SOMEWHERE ELSE when I formatted.

Yeah.