This morning as I was carefully packaging up 55gb worth of data for a client, I found myself in a conundrum of sorts.  I started the archive only to realize that I was archiving both the archived files and the unarchived files.  This would make the download somewhere in the 36-40gb range when it should have been 18gb.

So I stopped the archive, and deleted the archive file, then proceeded to the empty garbage file.  Unfortunately, what I found that I had deleted quite permanently was the original data files and all I was left with was a partial broken archive.

The really unfortunate part of this story is that I was stupidly working from my backup archive of the data in the first place instead of copying the data to my laptop.  Thus, the data is gone, hosed, lost forever.  Oh what joy!  Now I have to see if I can dig up the bits and pieces to re-produce the archive or at least the important parts of it.  I guess that is why we say, backup your backups.