BACKUP, BACKUP,BACKUP

Yes, that's what I tell all my friends as I religiously copy all my documents and photos to a portable hard drive and to DVD ROM. Well that's what I thought until I tried to find a photo taken about 1989. To my surprise none of the prints I had spent months scanning and tweaking in Photoshop were on any of the usual places. I went through all the DVD's and CD's one by one but still no copies of all those scanned prints.
I spent days searching, even looking at deleted files on the portable hard drive....... nothing.
My last hope was a scrap 3.5in hard drive which had failed in my laptop and been replaced as it would not boot the laptop. Previously, Scandisk took about 8 hours and failed as did a format. So there was little hope of recovering anything from that one. I was desperate, found a free ( yes absolutely free!!!!) program which will recover lost partitions see http://www.powerdatarecovery.com/index.html
It took about 12 hours to battle its way through the 80GB hard drive which was in a caddy on a USB port and finally gave an option to save the data. All the usual bits and pieces were there and then there were the scanned prints!!!!
Did I press save, you bet I did and then copied to every device in my possession!

So the moral of my story is yes, backup in many places but periodically check that everything is present.