AI or not, I feel like everybody has had “the incident” at some point. After that, you obsessively keep backups.
For me it was a my entire “Junior Project” in college, which was a music album. My windows install (Vista at that time - I know, vista was awful, but it was the only thing that would utilize all 8gb of my RAM because x64 XP wasn’t really a thing) bombed out, and I was like “no biggie, I keep my OS on one drive and all of my projects on the other, I’ll just reformat and reinstall Windows”
Well… I had two identical 250gb drives and formatted the wrong one.
Woof.
I bought an unformat tool that was able to recover mostly everything, but I lost all of my folder structure and file names. It was just like 000001.wav, 000002.wav etc. I was able to re-record and rebuild but man… Never made that mistake again. Like I said. I now obsessively backup. Stacks of drives, cloud storage. Drives in divverent locations etc.
I would love to go back in time and show this to somebody who worked at the Nintendo Power Tip Hotline. They would be all like “oh shit, AI is going to take our jobs in the future?” not knowing that their jobs were replaced decades ago by autistic people with dial-up internet making GameFAQs txt files.