We did exactly the same thing in my C programming course. Its funny how the best way to learn is to reimplement functions and algorithms that were revolutionary 30 years ago =)
The part I don't understand is why you would lose access to his Gmail/Dropbox accounts after getting your laptop stolen. Did you rely on automatic logins for all your accounts or something?
Also, why would you backup anything on the same hard drive. That's not a backup, its wasting space.
In this day and age, who doesn't sync their contacts to the cloud. All of the most popular services (Google for sure) do it automatically unless you turn it off (in which case, you should have known what you were doing).