Google Desktop: Disaster Recovery Solution?

It's been a rough week. For some strange reason Outlook decided it couldn't write to my PST file (maybe because it was more than 1GB in size and I was keeping it on a removable drive) and destroyed the whole damn thing.
A quick download of Thunderbird and I'm back in business - except for the loss of nearly three years of correspondence and all my contacts.
I haven't made much use of Google's desktop search in the past, but I suddenly realized that the fact that it keeps copies of everything it's indexing is going to save my proverbial behind. While it isn't organized, as long as I have an idea of what or who I'm looking for, a quick search and WHAM! There it is, cached and ready for me to review.

While I'm certain Google didn't intend for its desktop search product to be used as a "disaster recovery" tool, I have to say that it's certainly doing a damn fine job of being one at the moment.
So thanks, Google, for saving three years worth of e-mail and, apparently, my sanity.