"Lost a hard drive" - well that was what PV World literally did for me a few months back.

I've got two drives, as George Seto advises, and for the same reason. One has Windows, and the working side of my PC, and the other has the data - well it's supposed to be like that, and it is mostly.

Anyway the disc with the working stuff started to act funny, and the only thing to do was replace it, so I take it in. When I pick it up it all seems to be acting very strange, so I take it back in - and I find they've only taken out the disc with all the data, and sent it off to be recycled. All kinds of work, pictures, songs, the lot. And hardly any of it backed up, because of course they weren't supposed to do anything to that disc.

It did have a happy ending - they frantically got onto the people with the stuff for recycling, and were able to get it back un-recycled, and reinstall it.

The moral is, back up the backup of anything you really don't want to lose. Even if you have two discs.