Part 2: Tips on looking after your hard-earned digital property.

(sorry, "tomorrow" turned into several days)

Sometimes files can get lost or deleted by accident. Then what do you do??!!

If the file was lost and you can't remember what the filename was, do a search for a phrase contained in the file. If you're on a mac, open Finder and use the search box in the top right corner. If you are on a pc, open “My Computer” and in VISTA/win7, type the phrase in the search box in the top right corner. In win7k or winXP, click “search” on the toolbar and choose, “files and folders”, then type your phrase into the field searching within documents. Be sure you are in c:\ and not another folder before doing this search.

Once you have located the file via the search feature, open it and then “save as” to the folder location you want, giving it the filename you intended.

But what if you accidentally deleted the file?! Two scenarios might occur in this situation:

1. The file is in the trashbin or recycle bin. Go to your desktop, click on the trashbin or recycle bin and look for the name of your file in there. When you find it, restore it and you're good to go again.

2. Someone came up behind you and emptied the recyclebin/trashbin. Now what? I'm not sure of the mac tools for this, but for the windows-based pc, download the tool known as Recuva. It's free. Run the tool to dig up everything you've ever deleted. Sometimes the names are recognizable, sometimes they aren't. Recover them to a specified folder, then drag your file back to it's original location.

NOTE: If the harddrive space the file was originally in, get's overwritten by anything, even partially, the file may not be recoverable! This only works if the space has not been reused.

To recap: Save as you go, save major revisions as new files with different names, use your computer's search function if you think you've lost your file, check recycle bin if you think it's deleted, and run a data recovery tool if your recycle bin got cleared out before you could check it for your lost file. If you regularly back up your files, even an unrecoverable file can be restored from your daily backup.

Hopefully this information will help you avoid having to recreate your special creation.