Same here. With Leopard, there's Time Machine. If it's set up properly then you could have restored your KeyChains. Unfortunately, with Tiger it's pretty much like what's been said already. You stop using your Mac, and pay the bucks to have the data recovered.
If it's too late for that, as you've continued using your Mac, then there's always the future ... and hindsight. What I mean is you never ever allow this to happen again.
The choices as I know them are you go out and pick up an Ext HD, then look at these:
I personally use SuperDuper but I'm sure the others are just as good and personal opinions vary.
With SuperDuper, you can use it without any cost, but if you buy the full program you can cut the backup time substantially. I can't speak for CCC as I've never used it and AFAIK, rsync is totally free.
Alternatively you can use DVD's to back up your data.
The type of Backup I choose isn't an archival one ... what happens is about once per month, I hook up my external drive and run SuperDuper, which examines the contents of my internal drive against the contents of my ext drive. If SuperDuper finds a file which isn't on my Ext drive, then it copies it over and if it finds that a certain file that is on the Ext drive is no longer on my internal drive, then it deletes it from the ext drive.
So what I end up with is a mirror of my System which is actually a bootable drive in case my internal drive becomes corrupt in any way and can't be recovered. In this scenario, I would simply boot from my external drive and ... to be perfectly honest I would need to consult the manual as so far I've had no troubles.
I believe I could restore my mirrored system from the ext drive back onto the internal drive and continue on.
Hope this helps
