It's standard for "worst case scenarios" to simply go in and wipe everything out and start over fresh. One of the driving reasons why I went out and bought a second hard drive. If you make it a habit to
always put your data on the second drive, it has a far better chance of surviving a meltdown. It's only until recently that I grew lazy and opted not to create a similar configuration with the laptop. I suppose I'll pay for that one day.

I did, however, buy an external drive enclosure and use it to dump ridiculously large files.
Take it from someone whose tried all sorts of backup methods. Save up a little cash and buy a second hard drive. To make things simpler, buy an external USB 2 drive.
It's probably not any consolation, but I used to get BSoD's all the time. During the Windows 95/98 years I was writing some custom software for myself involving some convoluted memory management and I got an error screen that looked like the one below. Wasn't fun trying to figure that one out.