I never said it was a replacement. I wholeheartedly agree that backups are indispensable, but when dealing with drive failure, I'd rather just swap out a drive

I never said it was a replacement. I wholeheartedly agree that backups are indispensable, but when dealing with drive failure, I'd rather just swap out a drive and not have to deal with restoring from backups. I find backups are good for fine grained laser focused restores—trying to restore an entire drive is either slow, or error prone, especially if one deals with hard links a lot.