If you haven't already, please backup your computer.

I had a scare but luckily got a second chance and am now triple-backing everything.

External hard drives can be had very cheap now. There are also very cheap online services that do backup (I'm using a software called CrashPlan that's $4 a month).

At the very very least, email yourself any critical files, that way if you have a disk crash you can at least get them from the email.