I was thinking about backups again, while in the shower earlier. I think what clued me in to the joy of super reliable backups that can be restored on bare metal was Mac OS X having Time Machine early in.
I remember completely hosing the system via a terrible fuck up at some point. I just went "oh whoops", held the magic key sequence while booting to go in recovery, and did a bare metal recovery with a single click.
Within 15 minutes my laptop was exactly how it was before the terrible events, nothing was lost. I had successfully turned back time.
I've been more or less chasing that feeling of security in all my backup solutions since. Tarballs are nice, but you know, "I just restored a veeam image from live media" is nicer.