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Waiting too long to get a backup policy in place is an idiotic, moronic thing to do.
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Yes, it is. But I've been guilty of slow backups myself, sometimes to my own detriment. So don't be too hard on yourself. Hard enough to learn better, yes. But as my baseball coach used to say, "shake it off" and "you'll get 'em next time". And I did. (I'll spare you the swat on the butt, however.)
The only place I suggest is Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery:
http://www.krollontrack.com/data-recovery
It will run at least $1,000 to recover a bad drive. However, you need to understand it requires precision tools and training, in an ISO clean room. Not exactly easy work, or a cheap sort of business to maintain. Is it worth it? It was to me, and it is to their customers. If that drive reflects a year of work, 365 days x $3 = ~$1,000 range. So $3 per day -- is your time worth $3 per day? I would imagine so. When you send them a drive, they'll email a spreadsheet listing the recoverable files, including the % of recovery possible. If you agree, they'll recover the files to a new hard drive (which they provide). If you deny, you'll have to pay return shipping to retrieve your unfixed drive.
I still have my recovery list, and thanks to a recent defrag just prior to the crash, I recovered something like 95% of the files perfectly, with the remaining files merely being damaged (although still playable, with bad frames here and there). I think a few tiny TXT note files were completely lost, but not a big issue.
In my case, the drive's death was from an internal mechanical failure. The platter itself was fine, save the area where the arm likely struck the surface of the disk. Literally, the "crash" of the drive. And the data at that location was damaged.
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hard drives are not a good long term archive solution - I'm going to go back to saving what really matters to me on dvd
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That's still not a wise solution. Duplicate, duplicate, duplicate! Triplicate. Quadruplicate. Put files on disc, copy those discs to more discs, copy those discs to drives, copy those drives to more drives. Then put some at home, some at another location (office or home of family/parents/siblings). That's a good redundant backup solution that would pretty much only fail if the world ended (atmospheric EMP, nuclear war, alien invasion, killer meteor, etc). It costs you a few bucks for the blank media, yes. It takes a good bit of time to do all that copying, yes. But long-term, it's a great insurance policy for your data.
I feel for you, I really do. Been there, done that. It's a lousy feeling to lose everything.