My best backup has always been having a buffer visiting the file I'm about to delete. I think that's saved my bacon once or twice, but honestly I have 0 paranoia about losing data. For whatever reason, I've never accidentally deleted .git and an important unpushed change at the same time. As a result I disable swap files and backup files in Emacs, and I haven't regretted it.

My biggest data loss incident was like 25 years ago when I ran "swapon" on /. Wouldn't recommend it. (And that will trash your Trash, probably.)