Some of those bugs from 31.01 really made me have to be careful about making plenty of backup saves. What was it, again, fats or something that caused the game to crash if you scrolled past them in the stocks screen?
I also like to have the rolling backup saves for the purposes of letting me track my progress as a fort. I tend to keep seasonal saves for my first two years, when I'm really aggressively expanding, and yearly saves thereafter. When you get one of those zoomed-out shots of some of your most major z-levels, and see the expansion of a cross section of your fortress over time, it's a pretty cool effect. ("Ah, that's when I dug the tunnel for my magma pump stack. Did I really get all that done in one season?")
But I guess there should be more difference between the words "save" and "savescum". I'm not doing any of that to "cheat", I'm not constantly reloading to get a better random die roll or correct some mistake in causing a cave in, so I guess in that sense, I'm "no, never will I savescum", but I don't make up some big absolute about it that I can proudly announce. I do like to occasionally re-roll some dwarves, though. Especially my starting seven, before I embark (does restarting count as "Savescumming", anyway?), so that I can get a set of personality traits that I kind of like.
To a certain extent, though, I think the difference between some of these "never savescum" people and the "yeah, to get some things I have to get right" people can come down to whether they are people who play for survival and who don't care about individual dwarves at all and don't bother to grow anything but plump helmets and maybe slaughter some animals, and the people who play for doing everything and setting up the "perfect fortress", however they define it.