Well, personally I tend to get frustrated when someone posts that he lost progress, but it's like the 4th or 5th time and he still doesn't learn, though. In that case I might end up just replying "lrn2backup" or stuff like that. When it's the first time I prefer to redirect him here, though.

As a Z80 ASM coder, I thought I should share this one experience when I changed over my OS from Vista to Win7.

I thought I had backed everything up by moving all of my project files which was on the desktop to the other partition (I have two partitions, one for the OS and one for all the other data), and I forgot to back up the reboot of Celtic 2, which I worked on for about a week up to that event.

When I went back to put the backed up files onto the shiny new desktop, I realized that I copied "CaDan2" and not "Celtic2". You'd think I would've caught that but it didn't happen until too late. I was having problems just dragging and dropping files into the backup shortcut, the damned thing was running so slow before I went to reinstall. Hell, it took over two hours just to get to see my desktop before I changed over my installation. I was getting rather impatient, but that ended up costing me in the end. I had absolutely NO backup of the revised Celtic 2 project.

When I went in to try to recover the files using the software "Recuva", it saw the contents of the old filesystem, but I knew my chances of success was slim. I mean, I cleared out an installed an entirely new OS and the chances of any of the files remaining intact was slim.

No such luck. It was overwritten completely by some Win7 component. The only file that was partially recoverable was this postscript file that was generated by Branchmap, which in itself does not contain any source.

In hindsight, I probably would've saved myself loads of time and headaches, and possibly the loss of this project, had I booted up some other OS from a live CD and copied the files that way. I mean, it should not take the same amount of time to make a sandwich to cajole Vista to let me drag a folder across the desktop to the backup folder.

Anyway.

tl;dr: Make sure your computer backups are safe too.

Glad you had your stuff backed up, but that still sucks. RIP Jim's netbook.

Well said Iambian and this sucks Celtic 2 might have died

Also it's always good to backup outside your home too. Imagine you got backups on CDs, flash drive, computers, calculators, but then a tornado or hurricane tear everything apart?

Yeah we have to remember about the murphy law sometimes

I lost my character health codes because I archived my source

Punch yourself in the face and cry