Don't know if this is any help but: I thought my N900 is important to me as it carries so much information. So I bought a second hand N900 while the original one is stille functioning. I found it cheap at 140 euro, 20% of the original price of May 2010. It's sitting there waiting for the other one to be wrecked.
So panatha13 could retrieve his stuff on a second hand machine, and sync with his pc?