When you see one of these, you may as well give up:
Yes, I was visited by the Blue Screen of Death earlier this week. My PC’s hard drive suddenly failed, and none of the files on it were recoverable. Fortunately, I still had all the original system CDs that came with my computer, along with a three-week-old backup of all my files on an external hard drive. Sure, I lost some very recent files, but nothing critical, and so far the worst part of the experience has been reconstructing my email address book (for some reason I couldn’t get the information I needed out of the backed-up file).
Tell you what, I’ll never be complacent about backing up data again. There was no indication my hard drive was heading south; when it failed it came as a complete surprise. The lesson I take from all this is that it could happen again, any time, and from now on I’ll make sure I’m prepared.