Death, Taxes, and Hard Drive crashes.

These are inevitable truths. You must pay the tax man, and you can't escape death. Nor can your computer's hard drive. I can't tell you how many people are surprised by this. Perhaps it's the fundamental lack of understanding about how computers work. Maybe it's my fundamental understanding the makes me wonder how anyone could be surprised by this. At the core it's all about the odds. The moving parts of any mechanical object will stop moving eventually. This could be decades or centuries for something like a well made clock. But for a device that crams more raw data than the Library of Congress, being made in bulk by the lowest bidder in a 3rd world country, it's a no-brainer. The part of your computer with the most moving parts, being put under constant use, is going to fail. And when it does, if you haven't made a copy of everything precious to you somewhere else, then the 1800 family photos will be lost forever.
The only thing you can do is take matters into your own hands. Start b trying to estimate the cost of recovery. How would you go back in time and take all those pictures again? How much would it costs a fancy data-recovery joint to try to mind-meld with your hard drive and extract the data? Try to put a dollar-value on your data. Then realize that for a small fraction of that cost, you could have a backup scheme that would prevent you from having to spend that much money.
Next, learn how to back things up .You learned how to lock your doors and stop at stoplights and make a 2nd photocopy of your tax documents. Backing up is Drag'n'Drop easy in most cases. Simply copying the stuff somewhere besides just the one guaranteed-to-fail is enough.
Get a 2nd hard drive. Invest in one of the on-line data backup places. Use DVDs, CDs, Flash drives. Just make a 2nd copy of your really important stuff.
Keep up with it. Making a back up once is great, and far more than most people do. But you'll want to keep up with it. Make it a routine (just like locking your doors at night eh?) so you alwys have a current crop to use.
Don't forget to check it. All digital media is unstable. Repeat all digital media is unstable. That means every backup device I suggested above has a pretty high chance of failing. Go back and make sure you can get to your backup files. Doesn't do much good to burn your entire music collection onto dvds if they get scratched and unreadable.
Really all we're doing is trying to beat the odds. The chance of any one device going belly up is pretty good. The chance that more than one all go bad at the same time? Less likely. And obviously the more time/money you put into any solution, the less risk you have (assuming you've done your homework and invested in the right scheme).
Now if you'll excuse me I have to go figure out my taxes: a task far more confusing than dealing with with a dead hard drive.