And don't forget those fourteen megabytes of e-mail you've been meaning to sort through and clean up. Also, if those browser bookmarks are really important to you, you will want to be sure that they are safe and sound somewhere. It contains a fairly hairy hierarchy of subfolders, but everything is in just about the same place. This, by the way, makes Sherlock's indexing a lot easier. Once these files are safely tucked away somewhere off your primary hard drive, recovery then becomes an issue of relative difficulty, rather than relative disaster.
Priorities come in to play here as well.
Assuming you have all your original application installers and system discs, you can pretty-much rebuild the rest of your drive from scratch. For these, you may want to be in a position where they can be restored from a backup rather than reinstalled. Some programs keep all their user files in one folder, so it is not that hard to reinstall if you have your user file easily backed up. Obviously, the hardest part of your system to recover is the System Folder, itself. If you're like most Mac users, you've taken full advantage of the OS's flexibility and numerous third-party extensions to create a system that is customized for the way that you work.