Whoa, whoa, back-up

Yeaterday morning I got up at 8am thinking I would be the only one up as it was a Sunday morning, but there in the front room was my sister (visiting for the weekend) on the laptop doing teaching plans for the whole week. I made myself a bacon sarnie, and started running a nice muscle relaxing bath as I had a football match at 10.30am in Margate and was getting a lift with Dan at 9:30am.

Everything was going to plan when my sister 'lost' all the work she had been doing. Apparently she was copying her files to another folder when they 'dissapeared'. I thought she was being stupid and ran a search for them thinking she'd maybe just dropped them into the wrong folder. I was wrong they had gone. I started a recovery programme to find the lost files in the clusters of her hard-drive and some came back but very corrupted. I was doing my best but by now it was 9:30 and I had to go to footy. I didn't have my bath, which was waiting there for me nice warm, taunting me, and so I chucked on some jeans and a t-shirt and when to Footy (incidently I strayed on the bench all match).

When I got back my sisters boyfriend had managed to get some more useable documents off the hard drive and it was a semi catastrophe averted....or so I thought.

I went onto the net on my PC to check my emails and one was a request from my friend Jo for some files from her website which I maintain. I went into my website directory which is in \my documents\sites to grab the files and SHIT....the folder was completely removed! Then it hit me. During the early morning I had downoaded several recovery programmes from my computer onto her laptop using her USB stick and obviously whatever virus/trojan had done that to her laptop had now done it to mine.

I was very pissed off but luckily because it's my web directory, nearly everything is on the web, and it's a matter of just downloading the sites from my remote directory. I've lost a few old files, or works in progress, but every so often you need something like this to realise that the web isn't infallable. I've left the PC downloading my folders (around 450MB worth) and when I get home I'm gonna back-up the ass offa my computer. I did read the Tao of Backup which puts backing up into perspective.

I guess the lesson of all this is make sure you've got everything backed-up that you can't replace. I've got Norton Internet Security 2005 on my PC and it has protected me constantly and not let a thing in so I'm annoyed this 'thing' has sneaked in. I ran a full system virus check but it came back with nothing so I hope it was just a file on the USB stick. If this has happened to anyone else and they've got some tips then let me know.