Harddrive crash

So my harddrive crashed this weekend. After a couple of hours with DELL tech support and running a few diagnostics we zeroed in on HD failure. It is not completely busted so even though DELL can't do anything I might be able to persuade our company tech support to help me extract important files from the HD. My biggest gripe is that I have about 5 years of digital photos stored on that drive and no DVD backup. yes stupid I know... but how often does a HD crash anyway? First time for me... So I'll probably play little to no WOW in the coming week =/ Guess that will ruin any chances for me to hang on to rank 8.