My external harddrive died on me- with my 30,000 lines of code
So remember to back up!
Pax.
P.S.
I was going to rewrite the code for Impedimenta anyway, so that wasn't too bad, now I am definitely going to rewrite my code differently. Now, if only I can remember what my formula were...
Backup when appropriate on a project, and if there is a major failure and you want to recover something you can use the liveCD to access your HD. Saved me from loosing all of my back asset WIP, a metric shite-ton of code and other documents that are less interesting to game developers.
Sorry to hear about the loss. Even though you were planning a re-write, it is always a shame to lose code to cannibalize for other projects.
I make a back-up of all my game code and design files manually every night I work on them by putting a copy of the folder on a flash drive, and then I also zip up a copy of the folder and email it to myself to save it on the web as well. I am not sure how stable flash drives really are, which is why I don't rely completely on them.
As a related note, there is some professional IT formula somewhere that actually tells you how safe your data is based on how much redundancy you have, and on what kind of media. If you have a professional, large-scale project that you simply cannot lose, you can use it to basically get it to an impossibility of losing the data, probably by putting it on two different harddrives, a flash drive, DVD and maybe even a tape drive. However, that is a bit of overkill for most of us lol.
I had two backups, the idea was if one failed, it would copy itself to the other. A script was scheduled to run when the system was idle to check for file corruption or file loss on both external hard drives to see when to duplicate the files. Another script ran to check the modified dates of files and only backup ones which were modified since the last backup.
The problem there is that the system was never idle!
My library in Windows 7 is stored on my server so I can access it from anywhere and from all my computers, and the server also makes backup of that to 3 separate harddrives each night. Both convenient and quite secure
It is kind of a strange situation that we now have all of our pictures in digital format on media that can fail. When I was younger, you just got a small, fire-proof safe for your photo albums and you knew they were safe. Of course there is the positive of the fact that they don't yellow and turn brittle like in the old days
My external harddrive died on me- with my 30,000 lines of code 
