It's giving me the creeps thinking if I took my laptop to be fixed, some creep might be oggling all my personal stuff. Not that there's anything worth oggling, but it's the idea...
Yeah. It always pays to have a backup drive put away some place for just that very reason. I had a hard drive recovered several years ago at a computer shop down by the University of Delaware. They did it, too, I was surprised they were able to recover everything. The guy said it was the largest amount of data they've ever recovered. And they've been in business for decades. Those guys have skills, no doubt.
Ever since then, I've always copied my hard drives onto another hard drive every six months or so, in case I spill something in the device. That way I'm only having t oresolve spill damage and whatnot. Like the one I have to take in now. I'm not worried about the data because I took the hard drive out and put a blank one in there with just the Mac OS on it.