Hard disk failure

Well, some of us learn lessons the hard way. At least now and then. My hard disk has broken down. Just like that, without any warning. And yes, I'm one of those who keep forgetting to make a backup of their files. I haven't made one for more than a year and the last one disappeared. Yes, months of work have gone into thin air: the coursebook I was writing for my fist year students, one third of my MA thesis, a corpus of research articles covering a time span of 35 years, at least 5 more specialized copora, one of which went into tens of millions of words. Not to mention all the text resources I had carefully collected for materials writing. I hate to think of it.
My mind plays tricks on me: all the files still exist in my memory - I still know where to look for a particular file, what the texts look like, etc. I don't like changes that happen overnight. Turning a new leaf. Starting everything from scratch. I prefer building slowly over the long term.
I somehow hope that computer specialists will be able to recover at least some of the files. Mind you, it'll hit my pocket. It's a lesson that I hope I've learnt now.