Wow, I am glad you were able to salvage the data from that dying hard drive! I don't think I have ever lost significant amounts of data in my life. Maybe a file here or there, but nothing extremely important. I always try to back up everything at least twice a year.

I remember, my mom asked me one time to clean up her email folders. She wanted to get rid of some of her emails. She told me which folders to delete. One of them was a family folder where she kept her conversations with her mom. I asked her "ARE YOU SURE YOU DON'T NEED THIS?" She said, "Sure!" She thought she had copies of those elsewhere, but it turns out those were the only copies she had. And I hit delete. Gone. Some weeks later she found out that she did not have copies of those emails. So, we deleted those treasured emails. We were both extremely sad. Of course, her mom's computer would have had a copy of those same emails, but her mom had died years earlier, and we don't know what happened to her computer. Since then, I make backup copies of my mom's files every year just in case.