How spectacularly the wheels came off...

So... last night sucked.

Well, last night and this morning, since I spent four hours trying to recover my lost manuscripts.

Yes. Lost.

They can't be active undeleted. That can't be system restored. They can't be called up out of the hundreds of back-ups made, because according to the writing program I used, they never existed.

So I can't open my Doorways rough rewrite, but I have a copy of it to Word, if I decline all edits I made.

Half of the original opening for Don't Look Back is missing, but at least I hand-wrote it over to my notebook for NaNoWriMo.

Guardian seems to open and refuse at random, but I've managed to copy/paste it to Word.

No. My problem lies with Eden's Son I.E. WiP2. The entire rewrite is gone. Poof. Up into the ether. All of the back-ups only read up to before I started it. There are no Word versions because I didn't send it to anyone to read. I didn't copy/paste because a) it's freaking tedious and b) it's safe as long as I back up? Right?

Turns out no. Turns out backing up manually to create an extra copy obliterated months worth of work in less than a second.

So lesson number 1: NEVER use freeware. It's worth as much as you paid for it.
Number 2: NEVER assume that programmers think further than the tips of their noses. They don't. So that thing that seems obvious to do because it's what is supposed to happen? Don't do it before going to help and making doubly sure that that isn't the one that in his own words "DO NOT DO UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES."

But now I have to wonder: If I risk losing my work if I don't back-up and if I do? What action should I take? Print every page every freaking time? Because apparently it means bullshit to people that you spent most of a year on the work you lost, because apparently: "It can't vanish." is a satisfactory reply.

But like I said. I spent four hours last night looking for the data. My mother spent two this morning. It isn't there.

I am starting to accept this. Slowly, but it's hard, because now I know that my end of January goal for WiP2 is screwed. In fact, I downloaded the trial for Scrivener last night with the plan to buy the program in a month, but you know what? I don't want to write. I don't want to even look at my rough draft. Because all that I can see is the end of the document that's supposed to be followed by 26 chapters or thirty five thousand hard-fought words.

And then I want to kill something.

But on the flip-side, I've never thought I could lose over a hundred thousand words of everything and survive, but here I am.

So... what's your record loss? Got any horror stories to share? How did you recover?
Any Scrivener users out there? Is the program any good?
Any other drafting programs that I can look at?