[Satcomer]

O.K. fellas the first thing you want to do is not panic. The second thing is have you tried searching for any of the data? Then launch the application /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility and Repair Permissions on the startup drive. Also once you have the folder up, go to the Finder's menu and open Finder's 'View" menu and "Clean up Selection".

To back up it is important to have a SEPARATE hard drive, like a firewire external hard drive. Then download a backup program like SuperDuper or Carbon copy Cloner and use it to back up. The sweet thing is once a "clone" is done of you hard drive to a firewire backup, you now have a bootable drive now.

Lastly these questions are in the WRONG forum. Shouldn't this thread be in Mac OS X System & Mac Software thread?