Gary follows up my suggestion with:

>We have only a small 947 with 2 1gig and 2 2gig drives and
>no private volumes.

The "no private volumes" is what burned you. Had you left only
your system disk in the system volumeset and the data on a
user volumeset, then your point of failure gets smaller. Lose
the system disk and that's all you've lost. Even with a small
system, you can balance your load between user and system
volumes and have a much smaller risk exposure than you do
now.