I feel your pain. Last weekend my geek brother suggested fitting a second hard-drive "to minimise the risk if the old one crashes". Needless to say, once we installed the second drive, we discovered that the first one had corrupted while we were performing the surgery. Everything gone.

Mercifully, I had almost everything backed up. Lost all my e-mail, some pics, some fics, some music files. The important stuff was safe.

Just a thought, but had you considered investing in a USB key drive? They range from 62MB to 1GB in size and just plug into a USB port, with no extra software or anything. You can hang them on your keyring :-) The reason I saved so much was because I had all my own stories etc on a 512MB key drive.