A few weeks ago, I dropped my external hard drive from chest height, onto office floor (thin carpet over concrete). Dead as a doornail. Cost to recover data: average estimate from multiple sources in the thousands. Finally found a guy (brother of an office colleague) to extract data from the drive, for a few hundred smackers. Supposedly, he can get 80% of the data back.

What data, you ask? All of it. For instance:

• All of my graduate writing, dating back to 1994, including my ill-fated dissertation in its multiple forms. All of Shelley's too.
• All of the pictures I've taken for the past three years
• All 30 gigs of my music, purchased and otherwise
• All of my arcade building designs, plans and templates
• Our entire financial history and records -- Quicken going back to 1996, and electronic tax returns for four years or so

Yeah. It sucks!