My data was backed up, but not all in one place. Rather, it was scattered over a number of DVDs, hard disks and internet sites. The system and applications were not. Thus, each one needed to be reinstalled. As did the drivers for the printers and the tuner card. Spent all of Sunday afternoon on this. Some products were a real pain. The disks these came with the printers were worthless; all the drivers had to be downloaded off the internet. One product had an expired licence key, and iTunes does not support Windows XP Pro 64 any more (the 64-bit version is for Windows Vista 64.)
I have placed an order for a terabyte network drive to be used as a new backup.