[semi-extrinsic]

Really good quote from TFA regarding their motive:

“Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you’d want to hedge against,” said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis.

[emphasis mine]

They're hedging against an extreme tail risk. Basically this is the same as why people buy life insurance. It's highly unlikely that you'll die before you turn 60, but if you do the consequences for your family would be huge, thus it makes sense to insure against that scenario.

Same goes here, even an extremely remote threat to irreplacable data is a reasonable thing to guard against.