Any IT person worth their bits will always respond to “Do I need a backup?” with hearty “Yes, indeedy do”.
If you are doing anything even remotely worth saving indefinitely, back it up. Do it twice, if you can.
I often backup my customers stuff on to a disk for “just in case” scenarios – even when they tell me they have backups.
Or If I’m stuffing a new hard disk into their workstation, I’ll dupe the old files onto the new one.
It is very likely a person who tells you they have everything backed up is hiding the truth, so I suggest to watch them do one,
if the opportunity arises. I’ve seen people back up alises but not the folders, or back up way too much stuff than is
neccessary. Also, one way to tell if your disk is failing is to do a massive write job to some other harddrive.

I have most of my backups on hardrives and cds, much of it is duplicated across these things so rebuilding the files back is a big
painful ordeal. But better to have dupes than to have NADA.

As far as my dead Seagate is concerned, my drive guy say it is unrecoverable unless I send it to DriveSavers and shell out an amount between
500 and 1200 dollars. I was trying to recover some customer files, most of my stuff was backed up save for a temporary image of a laptop
which wasn’t a tragic thing. The crash wasn’t really a head crash, but a disk malfunction physically obliterating the drive directory (so you could
see the bus the drive was on-but no drive) I do a lot of Disk Recovery and have been often successful with software and
dieing drive syndrome but this is the first time a new working drive has died so completely. I will bug Seagate about this stupid issue
when I send it back for replacement. A horrible horrible experience. Folks- Back it up.