It isn’t just replacing the equipment. I was in the middle of writing a master’s thesis. Fortunately I had most of the manscript itself backed up on floppies (remember those?) and the rest either in hard copy or on our PC in the lab.
And if I hadn’t had bad experiences with TRS-80’s (the original and very unreliable PC) I wouldn’t have backed up anything and I would have been in for a very stressful time. Never keep anything valuable in only one place. Besides backing it up electronically, if it’s really crucial take the time to run off a hard copy and store it somewhere.