Back up ffs

[RobertX]

Sorry to hear about your loss, gcjm.

I almost had a similar experience. My power supply short circuited and almost blew out the motherboard. I have an Intel D865Perl Motherboard bought from Hong Kong that costs a grand fortune.

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My main home PCs have always been generic clones in tower cases that I assembled myself.
Over the years, I have used Abit, ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards to do that.
I also learned the hard way many years ago never to put data on my C-drive.
I keep all my critical data on a file server in the basement, which also has an email post office service running on it that holds all my mail.
That machine has a RAID1 mirrored drive setup, so it is not vulnerable to single drive failures.
The only data I keep on my workstation, on a separate D-drive, is my torrent seeding data and some downloaded movies and TV shows.
I burn most video files to DVD, and/or copy them to my external USB2 drives.

If you employ sound data practices, the loss of a workstation or its boot drive ought not involve any data loss other than the OS itself, the installed apps and their preference settings.

Sounds like a busy office, velvetfog. Do you network your computers to a LAN?