Welcome from the middle of Alberta. You are going to love this site. So friendly and so much information shared. You will have to watch out though that you don't spend all day here as you will not get any quilting done. :)
I also had to learn the hard way when it came to losing documents and pictures stored on computer. I now use an external hard drive to back up my laptop, I actually have two external hard drives as the first one I had crashed, luckly I was able to retrieve all my data off of it before it died for good. Now I back up the back up. I could not afford to lose all my embroidery designs nor would I want to lose all my pictures.