We recently had a major computer crash at our house and are trying to recover. Luckily, we have the greatest home teacher ever (Thanks Bill!!) so he saved us. Originally we were just trying to add some memory and fix a broken disk drive, but somewhere in that process the whole hard drive crashed. Needless to say, I was not prepared and had very little in the way of files backed up on disks (partially because of the broken drive). Bill swooped in and saved us as best he could, but he is trying really hard to find another working version of our old hard drive so he can save most of my pictures and documents.
I've learned the hard way that off-site storage and a removable hard drive is the best way to go. Guess what I get for Christmas!! The good to come from all this is that I am now operating Windows 7 (love it) and my computer is light speed compared to what I used to have. I will be very diligent about backup from now on!