fantastic restore-from-backup -- i love you, .mac!

In august, when my mac first started having trouble, I backed up all of the data on my mac using Backup 2. I tried unsuccessfully several times to back up to .Mac, but I just had too much stuff. I wanted one coherent backup, in one file, on one disk, so I plugged in my 5 gb firefly (firewire hard drive, not joss whedon series) and created a 4.96 gb backup of all of my iLife: purchased music from iTunes and all my iPhoto's, most importantly. I also put my most precious stuff -- my writing -- on my ipod, and on a cd, and on a remote fileserver... I had forgotten that I had backed up my iTunes purchased music, though. I thought, there's just too much of it, I couldn't have burned it all to a single cd, and I don't have a dvd burner, so it must be just lost and gone forever... like my Guster album. (Sidenote: Audible.com lets me download purchased materials as many times as I'd like, which is far more convenient than the iTunes music store policy of "one dollar, one download," since I have three machines from which I'd like to listen to audiobooks.)
So, here's the beauty of .mac:
I copied my giant 8-14-04.backup file from my firefly to my desktop, and double-clicked it. Backup launched, all set up to "restore checked files." It didn't have any of the files checked, so I checked the ones I cared about, which was almost everything. It said, some of these items need to be backed up to a folder, so I created ~/Restored/ for that stuff. Spin, spin, spin, then all my data was back!
I "add to library"'d from iTunes, pointed it at ~/Restored/Music/iTunes Library, and <em>all of my purchased music was back</em>. Aah... And I pointed iPhoto at my restored iPhoto library, and it was <em>all there</em>. This has been the most painless restore <em>ever</em>.
To cap off this fantastic experience, I started on a redesign of my home page, using iWork's Pages. It's not much, but ye gods it's better than what used to be there.
My mac is the oldest and slowest machine I own, the only machine with just 802.11b wireless, no bluetooth, no smart-card readers built in, and the battery only lasts about ten minutes... Still, it's my favorite system, by far: the first one I reach for in the morning, the one who sings me to sleep at night, the one on which I do as much work as possible, the one I resent having to put down. It just works the way it's supposed to.
<em>*sighs contentedly, them puts down the mac to go tweak C# on my tablet pc*</em>