Ouch. I sorta went through the same thing last year when my external drive crashed. At that time I had all photos over 2 years on the external drive along with backups of all my current ones. The new files stayed on my internal drive.

Well power outage came and it fried the drive, and I didn't have the $1200+ I was quoted to pull the photos off. Luckily I had 2-3 copies of DVD backups, and those saved my butt. The crappy thing is I lost about 3-4 hours of MTB video footage I shot as well as a bunch of music videos.

Now I have (and need to back up!) my files on my internal drive, and mirrored copies on 2 different external drives. One is always plugged into the computer, the other is not plugged in, and they get rotated each backup. That way in case my comp gets fried I has still have copies.