I found the experience quite emotional. And it's happened more than once. For one thing, I DO make copies of things I care about, but then I work on the material I've got on the drive, like parsing a large wave file into tracks, and sometimes I have no idea of what I've lost.

Sometimes I haven't lost it, I just can't get at it.

Most recent example, a 250 GB drive loaded with text, photos, and music. It was all a compendium of other materials, but I was taking the info on an airplane trip and going to use it at my brother's place. The day before leaving I loaned it to a friend who was a techie himself. He tried to mount it on his system, and his system wouldn't recognize it. So he brought it back, and now MY system wouldn't recognize it! I didn't do anything else to it but tried to consult with folks who knew more than me about computers, and no one seemed to know what to do.

So last week I discovered techguy forums, and one guy there knew enough to direct me to a linux start up CD and eventually, after finagling, I got my disk working again, not a byte missing, although maybe a few nibbles.

I think there must be more stories out there of people who have lost info. It is easy to do.

So far, my problems have included:
Poorly formatted drive appears to have information but it's scrambled
Broken cable
Hard drive malfunction
System overwrites hard drive formatting info for no apparent reason
Hard drive factory lube turns to gum.