All of you working for small developers thinking that if you could do it, a big company must have are missing how it's even harder with a large company and hundreds of people each doing a tiny piece of things.
I think it's just as hard.
I read/write data to my hard drives so often that I'm replacing at least one a year (Between four development machines with a total of about 6 hard drives). The lifespan of a hard drive is only about four years of day-to-day use and I'm much harder on my development hard drives then most people are.
Sometimes they go bad and there's just no way to recover the data. I no longer have copies of my original design specifications or the first version of the code for the project I'm currently working on. It's been mutated and molded so much and passed between so many people (and so many computers) there's just no way to keep track of it every time I have to copy it over to a new location.
Art Assets are a different story with the same result - we've gone through I think six artists on this project (anyone want to volunteer some time?). At least once a month one of the artist gets in touch with me and sends me something that they were working on that they suddenly found. And several times asking them to send back originals because someone lost the first file they distributed to us has resulted in them telling us they don't keep copies of our work. Say what?
I've taken to burning backup CD's periodically of the code (And whenever new artwork rolls into our office, because no matter how many times you tell someone to work on a copy and preserve the original they always think they can get it right in one shot and we'll never need the art for anything else). But that's JUST ME. And I'm JUST the Lead Programmer. So I'm only archiving my one tiny little part of the project. And I'm doing it on my own. On backup CD's (Some of which I realize are missing as I know flip through the three or four dozen I have with dated references on them).
But then you have other problems too because occasionally someone will walk into the office at 1 AM with a brilliant idea for how to change things, they will stick it in, that code will get saved to backup. Then they come back at 3 AM the next morning having figured out why the code doesn't work and they'll remove it. But now you have two different versions of the software.
Worse yet they might not have TIME to remove it, so they extraneous code just gets left there (Just look at WCP or WCSO and all the multiplayer stuff that still exists in both engines, though not enough to make it full functional as it was supposed to be). Then someone decides they have ten years of their life to read through machine code and half the code they're looking at doesn't even DO anything, but they waste time trying to figure that out...
...yeah. Backing up your Save Games and Pr0n collections to a portable hard drive is not the same as attempting to preserve original game code and artwork in a usable and later adjustable format.