Death of a Hard Drive

A couple of nights ago our computer started acting a little strange. The Internet was running slow and we were getting a few strange errors in a couple of programs. Damien began immediately trying to figure out what was happening once I mentioned it to him. For a while he was stumped. The computer kept locking up and he restarted it over and over. After a couple of hours he started to suspect that it might be a virus or hard drive issue. His first thought was that he better get things backed-up. He copied the "necessities" to our secondary hard drive. As they finished copying over the computer locked up. When Damien tried to restart it, it wouldn't boot up - the hard drive was dead! I don't even want to think of what a close call it was. I had almost all of our pictures backed-up but almost none of our documents - which go back to when were in high school. I'm so lucky to have such a genius of a husband! We've never had a hard drive go out on us - ever! It is definitely a lesson learned and we'll be more vigilant about backing up from now on.