Was it a flat-out hard drive failure? If it's just a corrupt Windows (won't boot), you might be able to read it on another computer and salvage some of the data.

It's wiped out. It started working again a few days later and it's totally empty

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thinktankproduction.com

Man let me stsrt out by saying I feel your pain man! I cannot count the number of things like photos, drawings, variouse art pieces, ect......................... That I have lost too HD crash among other equally frustrating things! Don't let it get you down though, the end of the old is always the start of a new. Only this time the starting point is much more advanced and skilled than last time. AS far as those good ones lost to the Malfunction Abyss, remember we all saw em, so we know you aint lying. I too am flirting with disaster by not backing up. (I have a lot of super geek buddies with the ability to recover info from HDs like the FBI does, but thats no excuse) Cant wait to see what the New TT is gonna bring to the table!

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As said by others, external hard drive (or another computer's hard drive), and make sure you keep the backup copy in another room than the main copy, out of reach of flooding, don't leave it plugged in to protect from power surges, etc. Also keep a third copy around of the really important stuff (passwords, legal stuff, address book...), in another building if you can (but beware of possible theft, of course). Don't update this third copy as often nor at the same time as the other backup, just in case your backup process accidentally corrupts the backup, so you don't destroy both backups at once.

CD-R(W)s and DVD-R(W)s are generally considered no good for long term storage, because they can degrade over the course of a few years. Of course, hard drives do too, but they tell you so, so you can replace the hard drive before you loose the data.

Paranoia ? No, all this learned from personal experience.

As a Network Admin/Engineer, I ALWAYS tell people "Back up your back ups!" if it's important! I have 3 External Drives. One I save EVERYTHING to ( I never save anything to my PC's Hard drive for more than about 72 hours, max!) , one I use to back up the first one every 3 months, and the third I use to back up everything at the begining of the year! I also have all my dios in PDF format on a 16 Gig Thumbdrive and on my shared drive at work!

External hard drives are the way to go, but remember, THE ARE HARD DRIVES, TOO! and they are just as prone (if not more so!) to failure. So, like I say, back up your backups! Backup is important, but Redundancy saves the day!