>"The free market does work very well, most of the time, when it isn't being manipulated by powerful elite, government, and mega monopolistic corporations gone power-hungy. It really is quite a jam."

Exactly. And communism works very well, when people aren't being selfish bastards.

To me, your comment sounds like further proof that those who believe in the "free market" are part of a cult. No amount of evidence will ever make them rethink their position. Just like communists or religious people.

I don't care about things I can re-download from the net or most of my config files. All the stuff I really care about (documents, pictures, scripts, everything) is in a specific subdirectory of my home, which is under git VC. I have a raspberry pi in my office (several miles away from my home) with a bare repository. At the end of the day, I push my work to it. When I change computer (laptop on the road, desktop in my office), I pull all changes from the raspi. This combines version control and off-site backup.
The raspi has two external USB disks; a cron script mounts the secondary disk, mirrors the main disk to the secondary one, then umounts the secondary disk every night at 2am. At 3am, a server in our university's data center pulls from the pi, so I have an up-to-date copy of all my data on this server. I find this setup fast, convenient, and reliable (have been using it for 10 years now). If I have to set up a new computer, I install git and simply clone from my raspi, and I'm good to go.

Anyone else remember this (yes, I'm that old): http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-01-31