You have a full backup of your data right? No? that is not surprising according to a recent blog that I read only 10% of people perform a daily backup. http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/06/12/10-now-back-up-daily-90-to-go/
What now? You have had a major data loss. You will be distracted for awhile, this issue with cause you to spend time recovering and/or recreating critical data and hinder new work from occurring.
The good news: You can recover some of your data without recreating it from scratch. Look at each of your email accounts. Your sent and received mail will have some of the data you have sent to other people. The data may not be 100 percent current, but will prevent you from recreating the data totally from scratch.
If you had a hardware failure, sometimes (very dependent on the type of failure that has occurred) data can be recovered by taking out the hard-drive from the failed computer, attaching the old hard-drive to a new computer and recovering data.
Do you use Google Drive, Drop-box or Microsoft SkyDrive? You can get your data back from those cloud based storage solutions.
Lost photos? This is one time where Facebook, friends and family are very helpful in getting photos of your vacation or kids back to your computer.
Missing music? If you use Google play or the Amazon cloud player your music can be downloaded to your new device. I don't use iTunes, but have heard that iCloud is worth looking at to prevent data loss
Full disclosure: I backup my data 2 times per day. I work for a company that provides solutions for small/mid size businesses to backup all of their data securely, on-site and off-site. I have helped restore data for disasters big and small.
Most of the recovery issues I work on relate to human error, malicious files of some sort, hardware failure or theft of equipment. I have helped members of my own family recover data. My son learned the hard way when the only copy of a file is on a memory stick and the memory stick gets washed, the data is forever gone and the homework has to be re-created from scratch.
What should you do now before losing computer data? You will eventually lose data
With the advent of more and more cloud based computing, store your data in the cloud. Office 365, SkyDrive, Drop-box, Google Drive, etc. If you are a remote user for a corporation, make an effort to copy your files to the designated location advocated by your IT department.
I like to have data on-site in a NAS device to allow me to manually put files on another computer system. (This is not true backup but allows a second copy of data in many cases which is good) I use a QNAP NAS with 4 hard drives installed. This device has tons of functionality more than I use and allows me to have iTunes, files, photos etc all accessible from one location. This device also allows me to access files from my phone while on the road. (some minor firewall work did need to be performed for this feature)
I also advocate true backups and keeping them off-site. The easiest in my opinion are cloud based from companies like backblaze for end users. You can also sign up for the one that my company hosts at DeltaWare Data Solutions. We have customers primarily in the Midwest USA, but the great thing about cloud backup is that distance is not an issue.
Your backup/recovery solution could be as simple as buying 2 external hard drives and using the no cost automated backup in Windows 7/8. You would backup to one of the hard drives while keeping the other hard drive in a different location. Swap the 2 hard drive locations about 1 time per week.
The key is to create a solution that works for you and doesn't take much time or effort. The day is coming when you will lose data, be prepared for it.
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