I haven't been able to show much of my work because I lost all of it in the crash of my external backup. (Not a fire, just felt like one) Anyway, I do have the thumbnails of them. Just to give you an idea of some of the things I like to shoot. (It's hard to shoot moving bird pictures from a boat)
I wasn't shooting RAW then either.
In the future, in addition to your regular backup drive, pick up one of those hard drive docks that let you swap out the bare drive. I use one with two drives that I switch with each other and keep one in a safe deposit box. With the price of drives being what they are, replacing them every couple of years is also a good idea.
Most of the tech sites seem to favor Hitachi and Samsung these days. Seagate has unfortunately become more like Maxtor, instead of the other way around. If going with Western Digital, stick with the Black drives.
There are recovery companies that can probably save all your files, but they are rather expensive. In a case where all your images are involved, might be worth it.
I went through a similar thing awhile back, but only lost a few files. Unfortunately they were of a visit by my wife's mother from Japan with my mother, and they have both since died.
After that I've become somewhat paranoid and probably have gone a bit over the edge. I now have an external firewire drive with two identical drives as backups, a well as the removable drive scheme. The firewire is only plugged in and activated at the time of backing up and I back up to both drives at the same time. All the drives have bootable system backups as well as the image files, and also keep another backed up machine on standby.
Never again.
