Xbox Saves/Profile

[Buffy]

The hard drive on my Xbox 360 recently died, something that for the life of me I don't know why I didn't anticipate possibly happening. I didn't back anything up, so now I have questions:

Do those saves automatically backup to the cloud?

In particular, I had some completed stuff for games like Mass Effect and Halo that I would hate to lose, like character configuration and controller configuration.

Did I lose all that?

Also, I have no idea how to find my GamerTag stuff.

Anyone know any of these things?

edit: in short, I would like to buy a new hard drive, log in with my gamer tag, and have everything reappear. Is that going to happen?

[arus2001]

Should be a 'Recover Gamertag' option somewhere in the console settings, but since you can't remember that specifically, you'll probably need your email address that you used. As for just how much gets saved, I couldn't tell ya.

[Buffy]

The answer is nothing gets saved to the cloud unless you physically path your saves to the cloud. Which means I have a lot of games to replay apparently....