Talk about mysterious marketing techniques. Backup I have read about the importance of computer backup. My Windows 98 has so many files that I am not sure where to put a backup created by the program. It wants to store more than 1 Gig of files. I assume that, like most of us, you have mostly program files, not data.
Programs are easy to get back.
Data is valuable and generally created by us. As you have found, the conventional wisdom of copying everything might need to be re-examined because programs have grown extremely large. Most vendors still recommend complete backups, and software to achieve these results is getting better. When I first checked a Windows 95 backup using its own software, I found out that 80 files could not be handled. The reason is that these files were programs or utilities in Windows which needed to be open at the time.