Hi Graham,
I know it's a bit late now, but for stuff as important as your family and holiday pics, as well as other important stuff, you really should have a backup plan.
After reading about someone else's similar incident on here quite some time back, I decided my data was too good to just 'lose'.
So I bought an actual proper fully functional backup program called 'Shadow Protect' for about $100. It does auto backups once intitially, and then every half hour or whatever you decide while the PC is on.
I have it backing up to a QNAP (that's the brand) NAS (that's a network address server - I think!), that's like a central storage unit that you can configure in a number of ways. Mine has just two 2GB drives that are configured as mirror images. If one of the NAS drives fails, I just put another in and the system rebuilds itself.
So my data is backed up, and then mirrored. So hopefully there'll never come a time when I can't recover my data.
The cost of the NAS was about $600, so that all up cost wasn't cheap. But how much do you value your data?
Just my 2c
