Bang bang, that awful sound

Did I tell you we’ve had another computer explodification? No, I didn’t think so. It manifested itself by playing Ring-a-ring-roses when it was meant to turn on – it’d get partway there then restart. So I called our local computer-mender who kindly came out in the hour between packing and leaving for Heathrow for 3 weeks in Oz and Fiji. He fitted a shiny new hard drive, plugged our external drive into it and hastily copied saved stuff over. Except that it doesn’t seem to have copied everything over. Lots of documents are floating in limbo, including several months’ work of transcribing a diary from 1862 and the contents being inserted chronologically into previously-copied letters and other documents for future publication. Buggerbuggerbuggerbugger. I know we did a backup recently so where the sodding hell’s it all gone?