I've actually thought about this on and off for a while, and I think the better approach would be like what was done recently with the spam question - broaden it a bit to basically an `I lost a bunch of data, what do I do?` question.  That way we can hit the issue of taking backups in the first place, and leave actual data recovery techniques as the last or second-to-last resort they really ought to be.

I even thought about doing it `answer your own question Q&A style` after the last wave of `my RAID array crashed, what do I do?` questions, but I never got around to doing anything about it for some reason.

Anyway, I think that if one of the mods were to do like @ChrisS did with [the spam canonical][1], it would go over best.  I'd do it myself, but I'm not really sure if that's a good idea coming from just a user, or if it would get hammered for being a duplicate of the countless other questions out three or what have you, so I'm a bit gun-shy on it.


  [1]: https://serverfault.com/questions/419407/fighting-spam-what-can-i-do-as-an-email-administrator-domain-owner-or-user