I'm sorry to hear about your tragedy. But hey, that's why I dislike the idea of digital to begin with. I'd rather have a digital format that can be converted into a physical format at will, and with zero DRM, hence GOG. I hope you regain your stuff soon.

Regarding what you missed, plenty new games were released on GOG, and there's GOG Galaxy too released, etc. There are far many things to talk about.

Well that sucks man. The bad side of online only games like GOG and Steam.

By lost, what do you mean? The reason is that even if the HDD failed it may be possible to get data stored on it off. Try asking your local PC specialist place if there is someone around who can retrieve the data.
Edit, just a quick google search comes up with companies specifically target this kind of retrieval:
http://www.datadoctor.org.uk/?gclid=CJPC6_eUuMgCFUsYGwodmEQLrA
And an article:
http://www.geekyprojects.com/storage/how-to-recover-data-from-a-broken-hard-drive/

As for everyone else, take this warning, backup your digital life, then back it up again, then back it up again and keep that backup a long way away.

And if your still reading at this point, why are you not backing your system up!

Wow, that's been one of my greatest fears. However, since I've been downloading and saving all of my stuff here too, I've invested in a second drive I can use (these external hard drives in the 3TB range can be picked up cheap) to backup and keep a copy of the whole archive. I would definitely recommend doing this and doing a backup maybe once a year or two.

BTW, they also make tools that can hook up to your drive externally with software (some open source) that can try and recover your data, unless your drive is just physically gone. In that case, it's going to be a long session of downloads. Look at it this way though, you'll have all the latest versions and patches.

What would be awesome is if GOG could provide a service where someone could copy a person's entire library onto an external drive and ship it. They'd get a mark-up on the drive of course, along with paying for the time it took to copy over the person's game shelf.

Very thankful for the suggestions but, the chances of repairing are really thin. Also, the services that can repair it never worked for me, I always ended up recovering very few files, and usually are the ones with really low priority. :|

That's the only reasonable option you have .

Yep, I'm convinced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNnAvTTaJjM

NOT REALLY MY ASS!!!

If that isn't a legit tragedy I don't know what is, and NO I'm NOT being sarcastic. I think I could handle getting shot by a bazooka easier than I could losing my HD. True, I lost an HD once but it was a piece of shit, so what did I really lose? :P

My heart goes out to you

There are two types of people: those who back up their data and those who will learn to back up their data.

Sincerely sorry about your loss, man :( At least most of it is stuff you can get back, though it's going to be a pain, and not any personal stuff like photos or similar that would be impossible to get back. Hope those game saves weren't anything that's going to be hard to replay.

Not everyone can afford alternative hard drives to constantly back up everything.

Try downloading the games at off-peak times. Remember, you don't need to sit there for the entire download; start downloading the game, and then go to school/work or take a nap or even go to sleep for the night.

You can get an external 500 GB for 30$. That should be enough to last a lifetime (several years at least). Surely you can spend that much every 5 years or so and not risk the photos you took for example being lost forever. I mean people pay that much every month for their internet connection.

That might have been a reason years back, however storage is so cheap and getting cheaper. You can pick up 1 or 2 tb external hdds for £40. That's far cheaper than losing data. Even 4tb hdds are just over £90. If that's too much backup to dvds.

Find me that in Scotland then will you. Only hard drives that are anywhere near reliable here are second hand.
Not for me personally. I can download all I want. It is only data on my computer. If its important I keep it elsewhere.