Stratoblaster
Fractal Fanatic
One other side note - on the II you can back up and store both your presets and your system files in ROM, which does NOT require a battery. It is accessed via the utility menu.
So if your battery went down (which frankly is extremely unlikely at best) you could drop in a new one and be back up totally within a minute. No computer, no memory stick, no shenanigans.
As is typical on HC, that thread went 9+ pages. Sigh.
Yes the onboard ROM backup on the II is extremely useful and solves the problem completely for an emergency reload. I back up to it every time I tune presets, and take bank backups a lot to my PC.
If I had valuable recording presets as in the OP I'd have backed them up over several devices/locations (or made sure the studio was doing it if it was their gear) and did everything I could to avoid Mr. Murphy and his laws. To me, it's always a matter of 'when', not 'if', anything can go down, especially anything storage related. So, while you got unlucky, it's not really the Ultra's fault at all.
I've not been to HC for some time and checked out that thread and kinda wish I didn't heh...the funny thing is they are all going off the 'unreliability' of the Ultra/modellers/digital anything, but one big reason I went looking back at modellers was three catastrophic tube amp failures within six months a few years back (meaning, the tubes shorted and/or parts blew up inside (caps, resistors, etc.). Two of them were at gigs; one at a jam. I like tubes, but they've just become way too unreliable, and random, for me.
The only thing cool about my recent foray to HC was that I noticed Craig Anderton mods a forum there. I loved his tech project stuff in Guitar Player mags...you could go to Radio Shack, get the parts, and play Dr. Distortion heh.