Hello Sackett Searchers: Some of you may have noticed [and possibly with some relief] that my postings to the SACKETT-L have been rather "few and far between" for the past month. The primary reason for this was the failure of the hard drive in my computer on 17 Sep 2003. When I started checking my backup files; I made the sad discovery that although I had installed antivirus software to protect my data from computer viruses ... I had been VERY lax [translate; lazy] in making backups of my data. I quickly determined that I had lost the work of almost 9 months when my system suddenly informed me that it could not write to the drive. My first thought was to "kiss it goodbye" and reconstruct the data. Then I began to think of the hours I had spent online collecting much of the data ... And some of the data is no longer available online ... And the loss of my saved email meant that I had lost the email addresses of many of those who have sent me information. "To make a long story short"; I sent my drive to a Data Recovery firm to see if the data could be recovered from the drive. Now, I had known that data recovery can be expensive ... But I almost choked when I was informed that it would cost from $1,000-$2,000 to recover my data. After I told them that I could not manage to pay that much and made a plea of poverty ... I told them to send the drive back to me. A couple of hours later the man called back and said that they had finally accessed the drive and that they could cut the cost of recovery to $750. According to the file list he sent ... All of my data will be recovered. Needless to say: I AM GOING TO START MAKING BACKUPS ON A REGULAR SCHEDULE. And if each one of you have not been doing this: START DOING IT TODAY !! Thurmon

Thurman, Thank you for the warning. I also lost a lot of work when my hard drive got knocked out by a power surge. I thought I was protected by my power surge strip but low and behold, I never had a phone connection on the power strip so that is how my computer got knocked out and I lost a lot of work- genealogy and all. Shortly after that my second computer was knocked out because of the same situation. I never realized the real problem till the second one got knocked out too. I still have to get the second one fixed and am in the same boat you are in. I can't afford the repair bill. I do have the hard drive now but I still have to get someone to fix it for me. GET A POWER SUPPLY WITH SURGE PROTECTION PLUS PHONE PLUG-INS!!!! I am glad it never cost you any more than it is but it is a bad lesson to learn the hard way. Pauline