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["Colleen McCarthy" <cmccarthy1 AT nc.rr.com>]

Title: Deleted Files -- Please Help If You Can

Hi Folks,

On Monday I was backing up certain files and folders on my laptop to a flash drive.  When I do this, I put all of the files and folders into one folder and just copy the big folder to the flash.

The copy halted on a file that was open.  I closed the file, but could not find the icon for the copy that was in progress.  It appeared that attempting to copy the open file had halted the copy.  Does it usually happen that trying to copy an open file causes the entire copy to halt?  If not, is there somewhere else that I could have looked other than the tray to see information on the copy?

I did a show properties on the flash drive, and it only had about 660MB on it.  The folder that I was copying was 800MB, so I knew that all of the files and folders within it had not been copied.

I decided to delete the files off of the flash drive and start the copy again.  I started the delete, then walked away from the laptop.  When I came back a few hours later-- the files were gone from the flash drive-- but most of them were also gone from the folder from which I was copying them!  I looked in the recycle bin and they weren't there.  I searched the laptop for a few of them, and search could not find them.

Does anyone have any idea what might have happened?  Does anyone know if these files are still on my machine?

I'm running XP.

Thanks much!

Colleen

(h) 919.460.0641
(c) 919.349.4015