All this talk about backup is some times just too late. You probably found this page because it is already too late. You have lost all your data and is not able to access it on your hard drive. This is the time where you should ask yourself, how much is my data worth? If it is worth a lot to you, you should look for a data recovery solution. Nationwide data recovery is an affordable business where you can send your hard drive my post and they will recover you data. This way is almost 100% guaranteed to recover all your data, but can be somewhat expensive to use.
I know how it is to loose a great deal of data and will be glad to help anyone out there in need. Post a reply to this post or skip me an e-mail and I will do my best to help you. Nationwide data recovery business is also a good place to seek advice.

If you have deleted a file that you shouldn’t, there are many tools available for download for a small price. Just remember to check which partition format you are using before ordering. Here is a list of the default choices you should use for partition backup.
Windows 98: FAT32
Windows 2000/XP: NTFS
Vista: NTFS