My laptop suddenly stopped working, throwing me into panic - what if it's a problem with the motherboard, the same problem that killed my last laptop?
It turned out to be the power adapter, fairly easily remedied, but it got me thinking about backups.
I realized I actually don't have a lot to backup. All of my important work stuff is already under version control, available from another server. Losing my pictures would suck, but the majority of the ones I like I've already put on Flickr.
My email is already on gmail and Yahoo mail, as are my contacts and calendar. My personal documents are mostly on Google docs, and the others are available from various servers here and there.
Just about everything I do is already in the cloud. Which makes it very nice - practically speaking, if I had to rebuild my working environment the majority of the effort would go into setting up the various development tools instead of recovering things from backup.
Quite nice, and quite different from 5 years ago.