Probably could've designed a good backup and restore strategy with the time that was invested in this piece. A combo of full backups with append-only storage of changes going a certain amount of time into the past. Worked for me for long, long time despite my many screwups. Even when I lost all my stuff to triple, storage failure I still recovered a tiny bit stored on my cheap, write-once solution: DVD-R's. There was some bit rot but better than bit loss. I imagine their solution would be better done with a filesystem or backup software.

Note: It was neat that much of the community was supportive. I see the article as really a thank you to them.