"So the take away, back up your hard drive."

yes! Photos are priceless, and a drive failure and you you can lose everything. Sorry to hear this happened to you. :(

I highly recommend using a remote backup service like Amazon S3/JungleDisk, which I backup 35GB + of photos to and it only costs me around $8/month:

http://jungledisk.com/

This way even a tragic computer problem (fire, flood, etc.) and all your priceless photos are safe and secure.

-beb