I got hit with some crazy virus last week, stopped windows dead... My only recourse was to reformat... I lost everything. Artwork, music files, personal photos, countless toy photos... Fortunately I had most of my video files backed up, but the pictures and music files hurt the most.

Remember folks- back your files up!

Store all your important files on an external HD...or on the cloud if you can.

This happened to me last year.. a few days before the cloud showed up. now I use cloud and external hd

if you are feeling smart...

partition your hard drive so in the event that you need to nuke your OS, you still have the other partition with your files on intact.

or, ideally you could have a small SSD HD for your OS and a separate storage drive for music / video / pics etc.

damn man, sorry to hear that.

A few years ago I lost everything picture I had taken from the years 2004-2008 on a mac powerbook that turned into a paperweight. I feel your pain. I just recently upgraded to a iomega terabyte drive and started using time machine on my new iMac. Just have to remember to back up every once in awhile.

yeah, it sucks. The computer was bought in 2007 so lots of memories of trips/dates/birthdays/holidays from then until now all gone... I have an old laptop that I use in my workshop that I now have to go through to see what is on there in terms of lost files... and I have a few flash drives and archived gmail emails from when I sent attachments.... So there is some hope that some of the photos still exist somewhere. And luckily I have my flickr... My next two purchases are going to be a nice big portable hdd strictly for personal images, and a good anti-virus prog- anyone have any suggestions? I know the big ones are norton, and mcafee, right- which should I go for?

Dude there is a program you can get that will get a LOT of your files back, as long as you have a second hardrive to put the old info on. I had to do that when I had the same thing happen after a update. 3/4 of my files were fine the other 1/4 were screwed up real bad, the looked like they were run through a digital shredder. The less information you fill on your computer the better off you'll be. I'll try to find the program, and p.m. you the name. If I can find the disk, I'll mail it to you if want.

Last year, I lost a drive that had most of my pictures (thousands), hundreds of songs, and my tax records. I had these on a drive seperate from my work, and had never backed it up. My ex-wife had a copy of most of these things, so I took backing this stuff up for granted. When I asked her for copies, she told me she had accidentally re-formated her hard drive and also lost everything, but had not worried because I had copies!

I took the drive to a high tech data retriever, but they told me the diskk crash had caused too much damage and was a total loss. Sometimes you are just screwed.

i forget the name as well right now, but i've used a recovery program before that salvaged some things.

you might have to weed through a lot of internet cache, because they don't discriminate very well, but i did manage to save some important images from the blue jaws of death...

to be honest, unless you have a free subscription for Mcafee or Norton, you are better off just using Avira or Microsoft Security Essentials.

Nothing is perfect but at least those two aren't resource hogs.

That's my setup. Not only do I have my stuff on a terabyte HD, separated from the main drive, I also do hard copy backups of my pictures AND have an external HD to hold copies of my pics and music.

I got burned once when I accidentally reformatted the wrong drive. Lost tons of music and Lord knows what pictures. Never again!

How easy is it to replace a harddrive when teh old one is F'd? I mean - could I do it, and while I have a data back up - I dont have a disk image of my drive with the operating system on it. PM me if anyoine can offer advice, or point me to some advice. I havent had a working laptop for two months now, and I spent all my money on Gargamel.

as long as you have access to a working computer, you can get a cable to connect any hard drive to USB.

There are free tools for cloning drives, it only takes a few clicks and the cable is like $15.

So, even if you can't recover data from your busted HD, consider electronically wiping it and/or physically destroying it altogether before recycling it.

For anti-virus, consider Avast.

For rebuilding a Windows system, the last I had was XP and it came with a recovery disk, which allowed one to reinstall the OS onto a new HD, but the previous installation had to be deactivated. This involved the serial number from the Windows OS recovery disk and the MS website, but you obviously had to be in the possession of the ser#. Not sure how this is on Win7 now.

As for gmail, it comes with 7GB online storage, so technically you don't really need to archive anything offline, unless you've got massively high traffic. As well, highly recommend using Google Documents to upload important documents and the like. Make them private to be visible by you only.

For photos, just use flickr picasa or whatev. Flickr pro allows unlimited uploads, but of course it converts your pics to jpeg. If you must have your RAW images and got tons of those, you may consider external HD's, but a 2TB still cost about $150. Store stuff online and have it available and backed up by default.