Crashed Hard Drive

I wonder how many of you have experienced the loss of your hard drive? I lost mine on fri May 29.The tech attending to my laptop cooly said " I am unable to recover your data but I will try to reimage your machine". He said this with a flat tone. Some one with no emotions. As I listened my mind raced through the contents of my hard drive trying to gauge what was "gone" and what could be salvaged through email and USB sticks. I was not even listening to the tech on the phone who was repeatedly asking me permission to re image my hard drive. I mumbled my "OK" as I sat in a daze wondering what I was going to do. How was I to complete my deliverables and in what manner could I afford to be isolated from the digital world? I have no answers as I struggle to go through a weekend without a laptop.
Anyway ... the long and short of it is that I have lost all my personal data & no I did not back up all my personal stuff but managed to save all the work related info on a shared drive but my pictures and the audio books and the "other stuff" is lost forever. On Monday I will possible get my laptop back with a "clean" HDD ....Life begins again....

This is being posted from Anita's machine while she is away at work....