Oh adni, this is terrible. All that work, all those hours. Just terrible.

Is it completely gone?

Have you tried contacting Data Recovery specialists. There are a few that say they can recover up to 90% of a disk that looks impossible.

You may want to try to find something online. Try a google search for "Data Recovery" and see what comes up. Here is one such place. http://www.drivesavers.com/ There are many more.

I am so sorry for your loss of all that work. I know it must have been spectacular, as all your work is.
I really hope that some of it can be recovered.

My deepest sympathies for this. I know it represents many hours of your hard work.

Thank you for your sympathy motion : and for your info, (I thank you too starone )
You are giving me hope which they told me doesn't exists, because my hard disk is mini, for portable computer.
They told me, that only the normal air with the normal dust, if it going to land in the surface of the disk, where the data are, then they will not be able to recover anything! With a few words they told me it is impossible!

I forgot to mention that it was a head crash of the hard disk.

Nasty. Very nasty.

How tragic... I had a drive go down about a year ago and lost three years worth of artwork - mostly ads, package designs, logos and product illustrations. A lot of it was stuff I would need to re-use in new jobs and had to be recreated. I still have the drive sitting on my desk. I looked into having the data restored but it was too expensive for me.

You have my sympathy and I hope you can recover the data somehow. Loosing those skins icons and wallpapers is a tragic loss for us all. Good luck my friend...

I tried to save my stuff online (I thought anything was safer than me and all my mishaps) but their servers crashed (that is what they said). I lost everything too, since I was depending on them.

I learned, protect everything and protect it two or three different ways!

Oh man!! That is totally depressing!
I can't imagine the thousands of hours you must have spent on all that work.
Holy Crap, this sucks big time.

How about your real work? Did you loose any essential data for your real work and livelyhood?

That sucks, soooo bad. I feel yer pain. I once backed up my hard drive, double checked the CD, repartitioned and formatted, and never got the CD to read again... not in my computer, not in anyone else's. It happened to be the worst run of CD-writers HP ever made and, due to a class-action, they actually gave out refunds to all the people who bought them (as I found out, a month after the deadline...)

Thoughts:

- Partitioning is overrated. If you do it so that you don't have to restore a lot of static, archived material every time you reinstall your OS, it's cool. If, though, you are doing it for data integrity, you are playing with fire. A hard drive doesn't grow redundant internal hardware when you partition it, so if the problem is mechanical, you're still screwed with a single partitioned drive.

If you use a separate hard drive in the same box, and someone steals said box, or kicks it over, it falls out of the car seat, or whatever, you could find yourself in the same boat. which leads me to:

File server. I got a big, ugly design box under my desk, and a slim older pizzabox serving me all my media both locally and remotely, and sporting a big 'ole backup drive. You can get newer/old machines for 25-75 bucks new/used and they are steadfast companions. Buy a decent KVM swith, a little router, and they just keep chugging along... It is *excellent* for people who work off a laptop, since you can set up a private ftp or web-based archive and access your material from anywhere, and when you leave it on the bus you are covered (your work is, anyway...)

A backup *machine* is integral for anyone that uses a computer for their livelyhood, IMHO. Cheap and reliable. Mine is fit for nothing but surfing, shuffling files around my house and serving privatly (p200, 2 meg video card, no sound at all), and it has saved my butt countless times.

I am glad that your client data is safe.... So your new computer is for your house? Your wife will be so glad!

Here is something.... you were doing all those beautiful works on a portable computer? What is the screen size on one of those? (I feel guilty now for using my little bitty screen as a reason not to do better!) I have got to go look at those, they must be really improved since I saw them. I am getting more and more interested in Macs, too. Shoot, my friend would have given me his old one, but I thought Macs were not good!

I am happy to see that you are finding the bright side. That is very good!

That is bad... This is the main reason I keep my data seperated on another HD and let itn automatically backup every night. There are some good not so expensive backup-progs out there.

Sorry to hear you can not recover much of the drive. It will take many hours to remake everything. And when you are trying to do it all from memory it is very time consuming.

Everyone is suggesting ways to store your data for safe keeping. I have a way that I do it that works for me. Many will laugh at my system, but it works for me. I use old fashioned 3.5" floppies.

Most of my designs are small enough to fit on a standard 3.5" floppy, (if they aren't I use a file splitting program and store them over 2 or 3 floppies). So I have one floppy for each design, whether it is a WB skin, a wallpaper, or whatever. Of course, this creates a large library of disks that requires a lot of space to store them. I have all kinds of space. (I just wish I had all kinds of designs worth storing. ).

My thinking is, if the floppy drive stops working then I can just get another, and, if one of the floppies goes bad, well then all I've lost is one design that is stored on it. All my other designs are still safe.

This is just my ultra emergency backup. Every month I still back up the entire contents of my hard drive(including my designs) to my second hard drive and then I make a second backup to a bunch of CD's.

Finally, every six months I back up the entire contents of my drive to a tape drive.

(As you can probably see, I'm a little paranoid. But having had this happen once to me I no longer take any chances.)

Good luck adni. I hope you can recreate many of your lost works. Anything I can do to help, let me know.

I know that periodical back-ups are needed. My hard-Disk (a Quantum 9.5 Gb on a Mac G3 on my work) was crashed on the 3d month after the purchase. Fortunately, i always make one back-up of new files any friday, on Magneto-Opticals (now in CD-r/rw too).
With low prices CDR/RW, there's no reason to make back-ups, specially making designs/skins, that uses lots of MB and lots of work.