Lack of Backup = Sinking Feeling

[Stuey]

Ok, so I didn't really lose any data, but I was so nervous that I almost had a heart attack.

So I'm preparing to reformat everything. I have three hard drives: two P-ATA and one SATA. One of the IDE drives has Windows and a few programs. The other had content which I moved to the SATA drive soon after I purchased the new drive. The SATA drive also has some programs on it and a total of 165 gb or so of data.

So everything on the D drive was redundant so I tried to format it. Windows wouldn't let me. I then removed the page file from the drive and rebooted. I then was able to reformat. Once the format was complete, I couldn't access my D drive or my E drive (the non-Windows IDE drive and the SATA drive). The time between this temporary loss of my drives and when the system rebooted again, my heart sunk, in the assumption that I had just lost 160 gb of data, much of it unretrievable and lost forever.

So... the lesson I learned today is that I REALLY should back things up, and so should you. Should a hardware catastrophe occur, your experience might not result in relief as my experience did, this time. GO! NOW! Start backing things up. The end of the world (in this case, disc platters) may be near!