Early and often
My laptop was stolen this morning. Pretty much my whole life was on it. I'm not even sure what to do next, other than go get a new pair of glasses, because they're gone too. Gotta restart somewhere.
My sympathies on this one - this might be the worst way to learn the backup lesson. Second would be catastrophic hardware failure. But it doesn't have quite the same horrible feeling of out and out violation that theft does.