A painfull experience that most of us can empathize with to be sure... It definitely falls into the "that sucks" category

.
I had a customer bring me her computer one day because she couldn't get to a document she had been working on for a few months. No backup or hard copys either. Total hard drive crash. The document she had lost? Her doctorate thesis

. We sent the drive to Drive Savers and for $1600 she was able to get about half of it back--in fragments. She was happy to get what she did though.
She now backs up her work a little more zealously.