If you had N overwritable "save-game" slots for the universe, what would you do differently?
Saving a game stores a re-loadable state of the universe. Let's say saving or loading a state takes less than a second to initiate, and is impossible to do accidentally.
Would you lie? Cheat? Kill? (You don't have to answer).
What if N is 1, 10, 100?
What if N is uncertain?
What if there's a probability, p, of load failure?
You can also use it to do code search by automatically tracking which commit comments correspond to which lines of code. That way, you can search for drag and drop say and get back code that has been part of commits where the commit comment included the words drag and drop. You can also try doing code search without commit comments at all by giving each line of code a profile that includes words found in committed code where that line was involved. For example, the line may have been included in several commits where other lines included the words drag and drop, and so you might infer that this line probably has something to do with drag and drop as well.
I love subversion, but it's not really a great tool for everyday backups unless you really need to be able to recover every single prior version of a file (and even then...). I think something like Unison or rsync would be better for most backup uses.