I kept backups, even more so since they started collapsing at the end of October. The issue was a lot of us thought they were trying to pull things together, not go through chap 7 and liquidate. It's more than a little pain to download, upload, install, etc so many sites in a short time.
I did manage to migrate everything to my new host from within plesk - 19 sites (including their databases) in about an hour :thumbsup: No site was down more than a couple hours including DNS changes

My new host - Future Host - year-end special got me a VPS w/2GB of guaranteed ram and 4k GB of bandwidth for ~$60/month - not too bad, compared to my overkill dedicated server (for my needs).