Apropos of Paul's raves for Retro, a post I recently made to the WELL:

Topic 565 [macintosh]: Backup/restore utilities
#273 of 282: Sad Mac (doctorow) Thu Jan 24 '02 (08:46) 27 lines

Well, I did a fantastically stupid thing yesterday. I inadvertently trashed my ~/Documents folder. Then I emptied my trash. Lucky for me, the Microsoft User Data dir is locked, so only those files and dirs whose name started with letters higher than "M" were deleted. I lost a whole ton of very important suff, though, including all "W"riting-related documents that I've accumulated since 1984.

Lucky for me, I'd done a complete backup with the new Retrospect for OSX beta a few days before, when I got on a plane to go to Toronto (I always backup before flying; up until now, I've been booting into OS9 to run my tape-drive, but this last time, I decided to take a risk and use the OSX beta). I had a horrible sinking feeling when I relaized that my only backup of all this crucial, vanished data was recorded with an unsupported beta.

However, I am now 3/4 of the way through the restore of the missing files, and, woo-hoo, it appears to be working like a charm.

The lessons:

1. I need to figure out how to set the permissions on ~/Documents to make it undeletable.

2. Back up more frequently

3. Retrospect Beta for OSX works

I'll post again if the recovery goes blooie.

and later:

Well, the recovery completed quickly -- about 15 minutes to bring back a gig and half of docs. Of the 2000+ files I tried to recover about 100 couldn't come back. Unfortunately, Retrospect can't tell me which ones or why.