The wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data on your disk, you may as well have zero copies.

It became more pronounced in late 1990s when disks became more ubiquitous and the race for the lower price likely made them less reliable.

After that the idea of backing things up, no matter where they are recorded initially, feels very natural.

Once my family drove to visit my cousins. I brought a newly bought box of floppies just in case they had some interesting things to copy from... and forgot it in the car with summer heatwave outside. It was a very painful lesson, so many badblocks.

This, and the click of death coming from a Zip disk that meant 100MB of Something Important had just entered Valhalla.

Especially post-pandemic when most of the stuff in the theater is dead and there's only a single backup of the lighting board programming on a 3.5" floppy with a broken dust protector. Manually spinning it and blowing the dust out brought it back enough to save it after our first improv jam that took place with fluorescents on for the first 15 minutes while I manually programmed a single wash on a dimmer.

ddrescue trying to read a scratched DVD from a public library comes close. Horrifying sounds as you contemplate your drive wearing itself down, copy progress ETA 47:32:13

At that moment, I took the knife next to the computer to insert gently the blade into the drive above the diskette. It worked most of the time :p.

Especially when you're on floppy #25 of OS/2 Warp.

Yeah, that, "Any second it will give up and shoot the disk back out" thought.

tik tik tik tik tik

That 'stutter-of-failure' :D

Abort, Retry, Fail?