Using Shadow Explorer is a smart move (especially since it's free) if you don't have Vista Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate - you certainly should (but I have Business and use the full 15% of space for System Restore and create restore points daily and with every installation, so it isn't necessary). The only problem is that you need to have revised the douments for that to work properly. If you create them and never modify them, then no prior versions are created and thus no prior versions exist to be recovered. I've gotten into the habit when saving a document to making a minor change and then changing it back (like adding a space and then backspacing) and saving it again just to create a prior version. Unfortunately, I don't have that habit with audio, video, or picture files (as I tend to be too lazy to open an editing program to modify them so there'll be a prior version - but then again, I don't save many of those types of files anyway). I wonder if just saving them again would create a prior version? I'll have to try that and see - that could also save me time with documents as well.
And I do a full image backup every Sunday, a full backup on Monday, and incremental backups on Tuesday through Saturday to an external USB HDD so I'm at worst one day from fully restoring my data and one week from restoring all my data, programs and settings. If I didn't have a version of Vista that supported image backups, I'd get Acronis True Image 2011
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/ for only $50 (well worth the price - I've even considered getting it though my version offers the feature because Acronis is much better and more reliable). It really doesn't take that long and I've been in this business too long to take any chances - I've seen way, way too many people lose decades of work and pictures and programs they can't replace and other things (or pay a small fortune to a data recovery specialist who usually only recovers a portion of it - almost never everything). I came close myself once (before I was doing backups) and it was very scary and I've been doing this ever since that time (over 20 years ago - probably longer - I think I was using DOS 5.0 or maybe Windows 3.1 - :D).
ajetrumpet, this sort-of side conversation between ilikefree and me is also for your benefit. The use of habits and programs such as these will help protect you from situations like this. Sometimes it takes something like this to get someone to realize the value of doing these things even if they do take a little time and efffort and space every day (as I learned from my own experience though I was very, very lucky and didn't end up losing eveything but came way too close). BTW, are you having any success with the recovery? As I said, Recuva is probably the best of the lot and there isn't much the others will recover that it can't - I've tried them all and never gotten anything more but considered it worth the effort (and still do even though I have little hope after Recuva is done). I hope Recuva gets back most of your files - it's harder to do it with large files especially if the disk is fragmented (and if you weren't backing up, you probably weren't defragmenting on a regular basis either) - but it's still possible as long as they haven't been overwritten. And I still don't understand what is wrong with the 'caption' in the screenshot - what do you think is wrong with it?
Best wishes!
