Genealogy Chat

Lesson learnt at least! Fortunately as I said, I've only lost work since last weekend and the majority of it is still here on paper so I'll just have to wade through it all and re-input it! Lou

Seems unlikely Lou. Those programs usually keep a log file of what they do - check the helpfile for the individual program. But I would have thought that they would give a warning message at least before they wiped a file! And it wouldn't explain why the floppy disc suddenly became unreadable. Moral of the story is - do lots of back-ups - on floppy, hard drive, etc. Uploading to the net like Peter says is also a good idea. I email my datafile to my work address every now & then - that way, I know that I have a copy on another system that I can always recover if I need to.

I had that happen, when I had calmed down, I put the floppy at the back of the disc box and forgot about it, a couple years and a new pc later, wondering what was on the disc I slid it in and bingo all the 'lost' info was there. I guess what I am saying is try it in another machine before throwing it away. dave

Hi Richard and Peter Thanks for that. I didn't actually mean I'd had the same disc for 3 years, I have kept changing them! And I can't understand how stuff has gone from my hard drive too. This has only happened since I downloaded AGV7, Sygate and CCleaner. Would they have detected something nasty in my system and wiped it? Lou

I keep a copy of my tree on http://www.gencircles.com/ It's free, and the smartmatches really help. Peter

Hi Lou! Sounds like the floppy disk got corrupted somehow. They have a limited lifespan, so if you've been re-using the same disk for months/years then maybe it's just worn out? It's worth replacing them every now and then, especially for important stuff like that!! Does your laptop have a USB port? If so, you're better off with one of those little Memory Sticks (they're not that expensive now) - even the small ones hold several hundred times more than a floppy, and they're more reliable. Cheers, Richard

It's more a 'Why has this happened?' really! I have my tree on PAF5 and I hold a backup on a floppy disc (my laptop is ancient, no option for copy to CD). I used it this morning with no problems at all and closed it all down at lunchtime. Re-booted around 4pm, put the disc in and it wouldn't let me open it. It said that the disc wasn't formatted and to format it would lose all the data stored on it. I took the disc out and tried to open my hard drive copy and half my tree has gone! Luckily my teenager knows a little about computers and he managed to find my compressed back up and got that going for me but everything I've done since last weekend has been lost. I'm not that 'techi' but I haven't done anything today that I haven't done every day for almost 3 years and I can't understand what has gone wrong. Any suggestions appreciated, if only so I can try and avoid it happening again Thanks

Give me a minute though.....