As I was filling out my income taxes last year I woke one morning to discover that during the night, gremlins had converted my financial records for the past three years into undecipherable hash. After I got my heart re-started, I entered Time Machine and went back in time to one hour before I had quit working the previous evening and recovered the thrashed data file with the loss of at most several minutes of newly entered data and a few minutes time — not counting the several minutes of total panic when I discovered the thrashed file. To me recovering that one file was worth several orders of magnitude more than all the money Time Machine and its supporting hardware could or would ever cost.
More than once while beta testing new features I have found myself with an un-bootable system and using the Recovery Drive and Time Machine I have been able to selectively recover the entire system, or just my data files, or my data files and applications and I have never lost more than an hour's worth of data. Yes I could have recovered from a clone but not without significant data loss.
