So glad you was able to recover your files.
I went ahead and got the 15 day free trial for Carbonite and will probably end up getting. (I also have a lot of music, pictures, etc. on my laptop and was feeling quite unsafe.)
I have Norton too, but is limited to 2GB, it does backups regularly, but in no way does it capture all of my materials.
Already purchased an EHD and I also have flash drives, but will probably manually do the backup on them because I do not want my EHD hooked up to my computer all of the time since I am a laptop user.