A glitch in the 3.12 merge window

It was asked, and Linus responded that he doesn't bother with backups as such on his machines. He keeps all the important things on multiple machines (plus critical things like SSH keys on offline media)

The problem here isn't really the loss of the disk, it's the timing of it (just as he's about to travel) and the fact that there may be some merge requests that people will have to re-send