my experience was that once you get used to keeping everything important in either svn or in a backup snapshot, you simply become annoyed by all of the tilde files lying around.

You can change where the swap files are saved too with `set directory=path`

Possibly to speed up opening large files. There is a plugin that does this for files above a configured size.

it can be a security risk, for example, .php config files on a web server.