That’s okay, I have a laptop I am working on now. The problem is I lost all my email address book files, bookmarks I used for research, etc. Like a dummy I didn’t back up a lot of files I should have.
There are services that can retrieve data from your drive and copy it to other media, but they aren't cheap. Considering the value of the data you have on that drive, and the value of your time to recreate it, it may be worth paying to retrieve the data.
If you do get your data back, make backups, and keep at least one backup offsite. On your hard drive make a separate partition for your data. That way, you don't clobber your data just because you need to restore your system partition. Even better, store your data on a separate physical hard drive. Get an external hard drive for making backups. Get a backup program like Retrospect, that has a good disaster recovery. It has the ability to make full and incremental backups and restore a drive to the way it was at particular dates and times. Also it can store all the incremental backups to the same tape or hard drive as the full backup.
One problem with some backup programs is that if you delete a file, the file will get restored again if a full disk restoration is done. Some backup programs require restoring the full backup and then all the subsequent incremental backups in order to make sure the latest versions of the files are actually restored. This takes a long time, because multiple versions of frequently changed files get written over and over again till finally the latest version is restored.
Retrospect creates an index of all the files, and restores just the latest version of each file. It will also not restore the files that have been deleted. Retrospect can backup multiple computers in one backup session. It is also designed to make just one copy of identical files. If you have several computers with the same operating system version installed, it will make just one copy of the file saving time and media space for the backup. Retrospect can also make emergency boot disks for each coputer that is backed up. In fact it can make the emergency disk even after a drive has died. All that is needed is an an installation disk for the computer's operating system and the key code to install it. Retrospect then makes a bootable CD that contains enough of the Windows operating system to boot your computer, partition a new hard drive, and copy the bare essentials of Windows plus the Retrospect backup/restore program. It then reboots your computer from the new hard drive and starts the restoration of files from the backup device.
Thank you so much for the info.
My nephew is coming tomorrow to try to help me out with this, and I’ll share your comments with him.
Yes, from now on I will back up everything!!!