Unexpected death of my computer

My desktop PC died this week. I walked past my office and noticed an eery blue glow. Rather than sleeping, my monitor was on and displayed a blue screen of capitulation.

Your thing is borked. You can try and repair it. Or you can just reset it.

So I tried to repair it and it didn’t work. I did a quick mental check to see if there was anything irreplaceable on my drives, decided mostly no, and went to do a full reset/ reformat.

That didn’t work either. So now we’re stuck in this blue screen limbo zone. I’m sure there’s a way to get this thing working again. But I don’t use this desktop enough to prioritize fixing it.

It reminded me how screwed you can be when your devices fail on you. When I got SIM swapped I was glad I had taken precautions like non-SMS 2FA. So damage was minimal. Here, I was glad I didn’t store important information on my drives. I probably lost some dust from my mining experiments from years ago. But it’s not thousands of BTCs or priceless photos.

I wonder if there’s a good list of best practices every person should adopt to prepare for the most common system failures. For op-sec, non-SMS 2FA seems like a must. For information, there’s probably some back-up system I should be using (please send recommendations). My wife bought us an earthquake survival kit thing.What are the other categories? Which ones are critical for all and which ones are mostly useless?