Very true, and I can't stress this enough. Experiences like this usually encourage people to keep backups because you never know what is going to happen. As for the backup utilities I use, you can use Driveimage XML with UBCD for Windows.this wouldn't be a problem if people kept their data backed up...
remember this...ANY DATA you don't have at least 2 copies of is data you don't care about...
Or you can use Clonezilla.