After considerable expenditure with a reputable repairer locally they retrieved 18 images from my Hard Drive from a total of thousands.

Fortunately i still had a good number of recent images still on memory cards. They were downloaded and required some time consuming processing.

My back ups ensured I could retrieve a considerable number of lost images.

By good fortune rather that good practice I lost some but not the bulk of my images.

One other point in backing up. Its worth keeping a hard drive in a location away from you normal address. This avoids loss of images in the event of fire or a robbery.

Either back up at the end of each session or do so on a regular basis, for example, weekly.