Disaster...

Why oh why did Dreamweaver insist on opening Netscape Navigator, a browser I never use? And why did Navigator crash? And, why, when my machine restarted, did every single application that was open when Navigator crashed simply disappear from my hard disk?

Outlook Express, and several years worth of email, are gone. The entire folder simply vanished. Disk First Aid did not find them. Disk Warrior does not find them. They are just gone. Internet Explorer is gone as well, but I can replace that. But, my email... My email is my life, and that is gone too now.

Yes, I should have had a back up. And how do you back up your 6GB laptop hard disk? My email folder won't fit on a Zip drive. There is no way to do a backup without making a project of it.

Since the disappearance, I have but booted once and run Disk First Aid and repaired the drive, to no avail. After that, I booted from a Zip disk, and let Disk Warrior make an attempt, but I did not let it commit the changes, since my email did not come back. Tomorrow, I will take the laptop to Tekserve and hope that they can recover the email. I hope the feeble effort of Disk First Aid did not make matters worse. I am almost in tears thinking of the work and memories that may be now lost to me forever.

I can tell you this much. When my laptop is returned to me after efforts to recover it are complete, two things will happen. I will religiously backup that which is important to me, even though it's a huge pain in ass. I will also purge any and all products from Netscape from my computer. Never again.
posted 2:33 AM | link |