Floating in limbo

A thorough (well, as thorough as I dare) search of the external hard drive tells me that we did no backups between September 05 and April 07 - which isn't beyond the realms of possibility. But the latest backup doesn't show files and documents that I know were saved between those dates; that old diary, my CV, my list of the hours I work so I know how much to invoice my employer (eek!), squillions of photos etc.

But I think I've worked out a possible explanation. Between the last two backups, when all that work was done, we had an explodification and a tame geek managed to extract all that useful stuff and replace it when he'd scrubbed the hard drive. But when he loaded it all again he put on an earlier version of Windows (let's call it version A) from what we'd had previously but everything was hunky dory. Not so good in general but had features that we didn't have before so was okay. It was this version that was running when we did the April backup.

Then came the last explodification. This time we've reinstalled the later version (version B) which works much better but won't recognise the data that had been added when we did the backup with the earlier version.

I reckon if we were to find a computer that was running version A we could recover the data, put it onto a disk and then copy it onto this computer we could then do a backup (I'd also print it out onto hard copy so it's real!) and I wouldn't be fainting at the thought of redoing all those months of work.