Unexpected things happen all the time. An account gets accidentally suspended or an account gets randomly deleted.
You use to be able to backup just your hard drive and that was it. Now, you can backup all your social media accounts (it supports quite a few of 'em) with a service called "Lifestream Backup".
They have a free option where you can backup just your Twitter account and all it's data (tweets, followers, etc.)
In this video, I walk you through setting up a free account for backing up your Twitter. If you need more than that, Lifestream Backup is actually very affordable.