Broken hard disk

I am so sad that our external hard disk with all our photos and videos is broken. It broke because Hailey pushed it off the top of the CPU. I tried to have the data recovered but the problem is a mechanical one so it needs to be opened in a clean room. The data is probably still in it but to have it recovered is very expensive. I have emailed a data recovery company in Hong Kong. They offer free evaluation but I have to ship the hard disk to them. I asked for an estimate cost for the type of damage of the hdd and it is quite steep but I'm still contemplating on whether to try having it evaluated. It is so unfortunate that I did not back up our photos from August 2008 to February 2010. I have printouts though until April 2009 and was able to save May, June and July 2009 digital pictures. I am still so sad that Hailey's 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th month pictures are all gone. I don't even have a single picture of her Baptism. Now I can't do her baby book because I have lost so many pictures. It is doubly unfortunate that I was not able to printout any of her pictures. The set of photos that I was supposed to have printed were lost to our other hdd which crashed before the external hdd broke. It is a very hard lesson for me to learn that backing up is so important. There are so many memories in there that's why I am still hoping that I would still be able to recover them.