I have survived the death of my hard drive

It is the thing I have always most dreaded - the death of my hard drive. I would hear or read about it happening to someone and be filled with horror.
But it happened.
There was no warning -
it just died.
I was about to leave the country for 3 weeks and had no time to do anything except worry. I consoled myself that I had done a full back up about 2 weeks before (and had also put most of my most critical stuff on dropbox). But I had no idea whether my back-up was OK. I let Windows back stuff up for me, onto an external hide drive and it is done in such a way that I have never managed to get into the back-up to be able to check it.
So - 3 weeks on - I got home and discovered that I was just inside the 3 year extended warranty that I had bought from Dell. They were lovely and sent someone out in the next couple of days who replaced the drive. Sadly under the terms of the warranty the old drive had to be returned to Dell - so no chance of even trying to get anything off it. What is the point of that Dell?
So I now have a new hard drive and Dell also gave me a new Windows disk. Now was the terrifying moment of truth. Was all my data really there on my external drive? Would I be able to copy it across so that it would be accessible?
Well - Yes.
I plugged in the drive. Windows asked what I wanted to do. Did I want to restore the data. I clicked - Yes  - and it did it.
Thank-you Dell. Thank-you Windows. Thanks to you - I have survived.
Things are a bit different. The file path to my data is different, so dropbox is very confused, but I can work on that.
The worst thing has happened and I have survived

So what did I do next?
Well I had to leave the country again .So this time I decided to take my computer (a rather large laptop) with me.
AND
I left it behind at the place I was staying - not realising until I got home.
The moral is
Back-up Back-up Back-up
and then
Don't leave it behind!