That's what scheduled automatic map backups are for
(
click and
click for example)
The world is backed up every 8 hours(or 3x per day), with 10 versions of the backup retained. This ain't my first rodeo.
However, the world is retained in memory and saved to disk every half hour. So, if the crash happens in between saves, anything done since the last save will be lost, and if the crash corrupts the world then everything done since the last backup will be lost. That is potentially a lot of work to be lost, and since players inventory is saved instantly, if the say a player creates a bunch of diamond weapons/tools with their stack of diamond, and puts them in a chest then the server crashes, they loose those tools.
And I think the irony is really in the fact that you pointed to two plug-ins that haven't been updated for 1.2.4... They might work, but without official support, I won't use them.
Besides, I've never had a bukkit server crash on its own before (since the Beta 1.8 days). The only few times when it locked up for half a minute and then regained consciousness was when we went a little overboard with worldedit (too many blocks at a time). Other than that, the main problem were just broken plugins that had to be disabled till they got updated.
I have, usually caused by plug-ins that weren't updated for the latest version. Which is why I don't update anymore unless there is a beta build and the primary plug-ins have been updated to support the beta build.
Don't get me wrong.. I'm not like "this is how you have to run the server". It's just what I've experienced so far.
And just as a heads up: none of my 9 plugins (from/for 1.2.3) caused any problems with the 1.2.4 bukkit builds, which is kinda strange.. I pretty much expected at least 2 specific ones to break, but they all worked fine right out of the box
That actually isn't surprising due to how minor of an update 1.2.4 is, I don't expect the plug-ins will take a long time to be tested against the beta build once it is released. And actually I'll probably attempt to use the old versions of the plug-ins if they don't officially support 1.2.4 just to get it up and running.