You surely have not missed the “Amazing November 2006 Blog Catastrophe” of Mark Rittman.
I use blogger and by typing “backup blogger” in google, I found [edit]something that has been removed in the meantime (and I do not use blogger anymore) [/edit, janv 2011].
It let you change the formatting of your blog to have all your posts (max 999) and all your comments in one page. If you do not have your own ISP but use blogspot.com, then it will replace your blog by this not-fancy page. But just for the time to save it on your local disk and then you restore your template. Surely less than 5 minutes , unless you surf with a 100 bps or 480 bps underwater accoustic modem like this one.
I have now a dump of my blog. The size of the html file is 440k right now.
If you use Blogger Beta you might give a try to my tool.
thanks, I bookmarked your page, and will come back as soon as I switch to the new blogger !