Let me get this right: the guy who ran a site whose entire purpose is to make fun of other people's poor programming practices has no external backups?
Programming is not system administration. As a programmer, I learned long ago that I can pay people to keep systems up, and that they do better than me and cost less than me. Handling a failing disk is the job of a sysadmin, not a programmer.
Sometimes I'm extremely shocked at how cavalier professionals are at maintaining your data and I've worked with plenty.