Re: Not having a 'Plan B' is madness
Err, in this case he did not have anything to restore it to.
In the Windows world Macrium Reflect is seriously cool and can do out of place restores to different hardware, including virtual. As with all these things you need to have the backups, take them on a regular basis and have somewhere to restore them if the original hardware is beyond repair.
The limitation with all these things is the amount of space on the disks. With 1TB SSDs now becoming mainstream in posh latops you need some serious storage to take even two fulls and weeks worth of incremental images.