Wow... I typed "serious" quite a few times in that post. I'm usually more poetic... lol.
But HDD failure (without a backup) is about as serious as it gets for us audio freaks.
Loss of hours of cofig stuff (and having to reload/rereg/etc) and irreplaceable audio files... total worst nightmare.
So "seriously" do a back up to an external drive as soon as you can... if you can.