I can't fathom developers not having backups. Hell, I back everything up to SpiderOak and then to my RAIDed NAS at home which, again, goes to SpiderOak and S3. It's not that I'm paranoid, it's just that they're so easy to set up and cheap to run that I just left them there when the new thing came.
Edit: I just re-read what I posted in this comment, and I think I was unclear. Just stating that my initial response was in agreement with yours, though that might have been easy to miss if you were skimming.
It's just that making backups is kind of useless if you don't store them in a separate physical location. For just about every scenario in which you'd conceivably need a backup, except for "oops I accidentally did `rm / -rf`", they might as well have backed it up to `/dev/null` and save themselves some diskspace.
That said, I know how much this sucks (actually not because I've always made proper backups, but let's say I can imagine), I'm saying this more as a warning to everybody else who might be reading this, not to bash them over their heads about their mistake.
They got burgled, FFS, I feel for those poor fellows, that really sucks.
Yes. For the avoidance of all doubt (and I thought it went without saying) I feel sorry for them too; being robbed is really rough and losing a bunch of work because of it is also really rough.
And insurance is such a scam that I'd be curious to know if they get any money or if their insurance refuses to pay out.
It shouldn't happen, and for the people responsible for the loss of this data, it never should have. Again though, it's easy to see how caffeine induced coding sessions end up with tons of code and not much else. Those tons of code are PRODUCT, and they're building it. The idea of burglary sounds so far-fetched that it's always easy to put off til tomorrow. And backups took _time_, and _effort_. Time and effort that would have taken away from coding. From building.
Nowadays though, between Github, Dropbox, or any of the million completely painless ways to back up your code, it seems even more egregious that something like this can happen.
Admittedly, I use Dropbox as a convenience more than anything. So that I know a core set of files are available to me no matter what computer I'm on, but it was very natural to fall into the habit of making sure that 'important' documents went in there as well.
If I had to throw this laptop out the window and never see it again, I'd feel relatively assured that between Dropbox and Chrome, I wouldn't lose anything important. I've had a couple of hard drives crash recently, and short of having had to take the time to reinstall some apps that might have been slow downloads, that's about all there was to it.