Of dead disks and mail

I got an emergency call from my housemate this afternoon – his computer had hanged and was not rebooting. it kept bluescreening. He is of course using windows.
The problem lies in his hard drive. He’s only had the pc for a few months but the hard disk has started failing. It took several hours of trying chkdsks and running the maxtor drive utility before it was accepted that the drive was on the way out.
The only problem is of course that he has all of his vital email on it. And he does not have a recent backup of any of it; it’s all on the one .pst file on the hard drive. Thank you lords of outlook.
I’m a bit paranoid about my data. I have about 3 copies of everything important, one on the laptop I wander around with, one on a remote server and another on the PC I have at home. Then I’ve an almost complete duplicate of everyting on an external USB hard drive. I think I’m about 80% insulated from failure. I know if I lose one of the devices I may lose a few days work, but at least I have a chance of recovering most of it.