[wila]

What I did is to do all my work in a VMware virtual machine.

Then I wrote software for backing up VM's automatically (disclaimer: this is a commercial product I sell)

There's options for getting an email on success, failure or both. The VM files are all hashed.

VMs are easy to restore, so an actual restore is pretty easy without risking to overwrite the original. If a file hash does not match on restore, then my software will complain, but continue the restore anyways.

FWIW, all my code etc... is also in source control, so I am not relying on a single layer for that.