The US and most of the British commonwealth DID - it's called english common law.

It's a form of law that dates back to when a country separated from English rule, and allows the government to have a base set of laws to build upon, rather than having to make laws up after a potential crime has been committed.

Some countries have not changed a lot of their laws and still fall back on english common law on occasion.

By the way, IANAL, I just like the odd bit of history and law.

My backups, and I'm just a lowly student, involve two 1tb drives locally, remote backup to a server 250 miles away and a hard drive in a fire proof safe.

All of the off-site backups are done over a domestic 2mb down 256kb up Virgin line (static IP is free so long as you don't reboot your 1 port supplied router), and can be done for under £500 with no problems, exc the two broadband connections.

This may seem extreme, but then you consider that my Dell Precision laptops have had no less than five hard drive deaths in two years and you see that this is sensible, and infact not even fully prepared as far as I am concerned - I need some more hard drives and another safe in a different location from the first - I have already had a collage coursework backup go down due to firemen hosing a server.

maybe it would be better to leave them the install disks lol

dude, I hope stallman hasn't started singing the free software song again because of your post...