Well, not trying to be snide but your first problem is that you only had one backup of irreplaceable information. Storage is cheap enough nowadays that just about every computer should have some form of raid 1 or alternatively a NAS with raid 1 along with at least 1 or 2 offline backups.
$200 for 4 hard drives and some hardware in exchange for a near guarantee that data is never lost is worthwhile in my opinion.
Hell, for the more frugal there is an excess of cloud storage options out there that will be near impenetrable vaults for data. (that's not sensitive at least)
Basically, while the faults that both OS X and Linux have are definitely profound and problematic, they can be almost entirely avoided with nearly any data replication system, even just syncing to the cloud.
This happened over 10 years ago. I had three drives one with the archives one with the working files and one of the edits (Edits failed me). I had it in double redundancy backup and a on a second NAS. I even at the time copied to DVD. The problem was it happened right away but since my work was in memory it wasn't something I would see till the third day of pulling everything together for the final cut I found out that file system had failed.
$200 for 4 hard drives and some hardware in exchange for a near guarantee that data is never lost is worthwhile in my opinion.
Hell, for the more frugal there is an excess of cloud storage options out there that will be near impenetrable vaults for data. (that's not sensitive at least)
Basically, while the faults that both OS X and Linux have are definitely profound and problematic, they can be almost entirely avoided with nearly any data replication system, even just syncing to the cloud.