Ouch. Sorry to hear that. 7 years ago I lost several months of family photos because of a hard drive failure and my laziness to move them over to the normal, backed up location before it happened. I learned my lesson and ended up changing my backup/storage methods to a file server that has a RAID backup. A further offsite backup of the RAID data (spare HDD) protects against most natural disasters and theft except for perhaps a giant asteroid strike or alien invasion.
I use a disk station (multiple disks) from Synology but there are plenty of other manufacturers out there that will work as well or you can build your own. With me, my wife, and kids, there are multiple users and everyone accesses the network storage with permissions that keep them from accessing stuff they shouldn't which is controlled by their windows logins. Nothing but temporary files get saved on the local computers so everybody works off of the network...there's never a problem with speed. It's also our media server for music, videos, pictures, etc. for the TV, and any device connected to the network (phones, etc.). The device is located in a safe place via a long ethernet cable in the house where kids and thieves are unlikely to get to but I still have easy access for offsite backups.
I've since had three hard drives fail on me (one in the NAS and two in different computers) but no data has ever been lost. It was a little pricey for my budget at the time but well worth it in the long run considering what could have been lost in the disk failures over the years. The media server functionality has also been enjoyable. For all hard drives, it's not a matter of if, but when they will fail.