>the worst case scenario for a rebase gone wrong is that you delete your local clone and start over.

Wouldn't it be enough to simply back up the branch (eg, git checkout -b current-branch-backup)? Or is there still a way to mess up the backup as well?

Yeah, deleting your local clone and starting over should normally not be necessary, unless you really mess things up badly.

The "local backup branch" is not really needed either because you can still reference `origin/your-branch` even after you messed up a rebase of `your-branch` locally.

Even if you force-pushed and overwrote `origin/your-branch` it's most likely still possible to get back to the original state of things using `git reflog`.