It was a Mac, which most likely came with Time Machine - all she had to do was connect a USB drive (as far as I remember, OS X even asks if you want to use the

It was a Mac, which most likely came with Time Machine - all she had to do was connect a USB drive (as far as I remember, OS X even asks if you want to use the drive for backups) and she would have had automatic versioned backups. To be honest, I think most people need backing data up scared into them (e.g., I nearly lost a college project due a HD failure, and now I have multiple redundant backups).