It's very liberating to know you can do this. You can sleep at night knowing your confidential data is safe. From a business continuity standpoint, worst case scenario you get a new machine, restore, and you're back in business. When I trade-in my work laptop for a new one I love the feeling of handing them my old one, picking up my new one, and not looking back. Works just as well for ransomware, other viruses, ruined hard-drives, etc.
Exfiltrating is insanely more difficult especially of "the useful stuff" - and even then you have to sell it or use it to embarrass your target, it's pretty difficult unless you target people ahead of time - easier to just interrupt business.
All my data is in Dropbox, with a few helper bash scripts that I run from time to time to sync a couple choice filters. Otherwise, I interact with it on the website. Ransomware would have to be extremely targeted just to me to cause any issues. Security by obscurity. :D
But whatever attack vector was used is probably still wide open on your machine even after restoring a backup. Most people will just get infected again straight away.
Well, maybe. On the other hand forcing someone to update often reveals that updating does not in fact break the world, particularly in linux-land where API updates are supposed to not break userland. Many times users who don't understand the risk incorrectly assume worst case scenario.
