Hello Carl,
I am glad to hear you are alive and kicking despite all the strain this year has put on you.
So sad to hear about your hard disk failure and loss of data, most of which luckily could be recovered eventually, albeit at a hefty price.
Never, ever trust any hard disk drive (or other physical storage). Even if they are brand new they could fail at any time from one second to another.
And it's by far not only physical failure that you have to guard against.
It is much more likely to lose data because of users or admins making mistakes, like erroneously deleting the wrong files, directory trees, filesystems, or wiping whole disks.
Even the most sophisticated RAID arrays wouldn't protect you from these human "failures".
So, do take backups regularly and often to distinct media.
It isn't even necessary to run full blown backup strategies.
I often only do a casual
rsync, which is done with one snap command.
A long time ago I read in the preface of a book about
backup and recovery the author's reassuring comparison of people who experienced data loss to motor cyclists, where of the latter there were two sorts,
those who already fell and those who will fall.
Regards,
Ralph