For future reference I would suggest developing a backup routine. You could do this in so many ways. A friend of mine is sysadmin for a local ISP and his routine is something of a ridiculous redundancy, but very little data is lost ever. You could adjust this to fit your needs/schedule.
- All backups are done on a separate hard drive dedicated for archiving. However if you are just needing some of your work archived I don't think that a separate drive is necessary.
- Create a folder called backups. This is the top level of all archives. Then have sub folders, daily, weekly, and monthly.
- Save a copy of your file in the daily archives as the filename-date.
- At the end of the week make a zip of the daily archives and store that in the weekly sub folder and name it the beginning/ending dates.
- At the end of the month make a zip of the weekly archives in the monthly sub folder. Eventually you will need to dump to CD.
I know this is somewhat redundant but its all in the name of: DOH I should have had a backup!
I just recently lost all of my art work that I had been saving since 1997. It was 2 Gigabytes worth of images and God only knows how many man hours I lost. The sad thing is I used to have backups of all of that, this is how come I still had stuff from 1997. But the last copy of my backups got `86d a year ago and I just haven't had it in me really to even bother to try to create anything anymore.
I don't know if this helped, but I hope it did. Sorry to hear about your loss. 😱