Believe me, I sympathize with you. I spent yesterday morning saving all my files to a 1T external drive - I had almost 1200 quilting files! And put a note on the comp to save any new ones to the ED.

My computer just stopped working properly in April. I called Toshiba (as it was not a year old yet). The tech told me he could take my computer back to the way it was when I purchased it. As I thought I had everything backed up on an external hardrive and some on CD, I said fine. Well, when I got my Seagate out to download my files, it said there was nothing there. I had failed to register my it, so I registered it and tried again, and downloaded all those free quilt and knitting I had been amassing over the last ten months. So I got it all back -- I am one happy camper. Everything was right there on my computer again. That was $99 well spent. I continue to backup my computer every day or so. I have learned my lesson. I have since put all my quilting files on CD -- just in case.

I have had a crash or two and Jim is able to tell the computer that it is an earlier time and stuff comes back. Maybe you could call a technician....

Take it to a store that specializes in computers. We have The Geek Squad in Colorado. The information has to be there somewhere! I am heart sick for you. Best wishes!

I have all my pictures of quilts I made and pictures of the process of making a quilt. I put all my pictures on a flash drive. I have all family, quilt, special occasions etc on a flash drive. I have just one for quilts. I have a regular journal of my quilts. I just bought an external hard drive which is nice because I don't need the Flash drives it is worth the money. I also backup my computer once a month. It is a good habit to get into. Learned that at work when things got deleted.

I am so sorry for your loss :( Are you sure you tossed out the recycle bin? If not they are there waiting for you. Also.. sometimes there is a wealth of stuff still sitting in "recent documents" in the start menu. You could check that out too.

Does this tell us that every now and then we should back up
our files?

On the other hand, sometimes this backfires. My old, faithful
half egg iMac was getting bad at remembering, so I carefully
put all my important stuff on disks.

Now, with a new iMac, I've discovered that the operating system
is different, and most of what I've saved is about 300 pages of
gibberish!! Sob...

reachforthestars2 is right! Take the poor little thing to the Geek Squad...for $50-$100, they will put all your goodies back!

I am so sorry. :-( God bless. Penny