Enabling the Track Changes feature will achieve the result you're wanting, saving every change and letting you roll back as far as necessary. This feature significantly increases the file size and isn't that crucial for everyday use, hence why it's not enabled by default.

It's not generosity but rather the way this type of infection is carried out. It will say something about recovering files by buying the program with a credit card; once the victim does so they reverse the hidden attribute to "fix" the problem.

I've had that problem and the opposite where I create a million copies of things so that I don't lose everything to a crash.

These days I just use crashplan and let them worry about it. There are other services which are good, but I like being able to have a local backup.

I remember one time losing a filesystem on my computer by accidentally deleting the . file. MSDOS had all sorts of safety features for stupid things, but that one there's apparently no safety feature for in any version of DOS I've used.

True but they could always just delete most of them, take your credit card info and still do nothing for you. So for a relatively knowlegeable user, I still commend their genorosity. :p

Calling a friend asking how to delete a file in dos ok delete *.* Oh wait i needed to do that when going to that directory first? My friend had to come over to get the pc working again.
And my first time trying to get linux working and the resolution was so terrible there were only fitting 2 icons on the screen. It took a veeery long time to get windows back on again.

Stockholm syndrome right here.

K this makes me want to share this. I used to work in a PC shop. This is not my horror story, but it's still relative. That being said I've shat myself up many times working as a tech.

I remember one time a little old lady called up and she was nervous on the phone. She said she had gotten a virus somehow and it was putting dirty and nasty things on her PC. I surmised over the phone she meant porn. She was so embarrassed by this whole situation she was afraid to bring it in. She had even gone so far as to give her credit card info to the malware to have it removed. I'm sure you've seen these types of malware and if you haven't you're very lucky. They masquerade as legitimate antivirus and tell you've been infected etc. Well, yeah you have; it is the malware telling you this shit. Anyway... I told her to bring it in and I would clean it. And I assured her that this was nothing to worry about she had just been infected with a hijacker bundled in with the rest of the malware payload and that it happened all the time. She finally brought it in. She was sooooo embarrassed though. I felt sorry for her. I told her she needed to change all of her passwords. Notify her bank etc immediately. I took care of her machine and cleaned it. Long story short; People did this sort of thing all the time. They gave up their credit card info to pay to have the malware removed just because they didn't know what else to do. Sad really.

Shut up. This was when me when I was using "old yeller" when I was an ameatuer. Plus what you did to my post is stupid,overused, and unoriginal.

Alright then. My apologies if I've upset of offended you.

Anyone remember the Blaster worm?

Not me.

I think I'm playing with fire; I have much of my stuff backed up, but also have new stuff I haven't backed up yet, because I've been lazy. (My computer is 8 years old...)

Well, the losses were caused by HDD failures, and in truth the last 2 (in 2007 and 2009) recovered enough to allow me to copy the data (minus one thing I simply forgot about and still beat myself over) elsewhere before sending them to be replaced (being still under warranty), though I really panicked at the time. There was also a weird one when I was little, when the accounting program my mother used somehow ended up overwriting the FAT tables (nobody could explain how it happened), so everything was a mess of names from the inventory (and other things) of the firm she was doing the accounting for, but I was 8 or 9 at the time and didn't have anything of my own on the computer (even the little games I played used codes to skip to levels, no save games, and had those written on paper).
The one HDD failure that did cause me to lose something important was in 2004 I believe. Had been working on something for several months and when I moved in with my girlfriend I of course put it on a CD and took it with me. Once there I initially didn't bother with it for a while, but then put everything I needed on her computer and spent about a month going through what I had done up to that point with a fine-tooth comb to weed out bugs and make improvements... And then her HDD died and took all my work with it. I never installed what I had on the CD again to do it again... And then, when... that ended I even forgot the disk there and she couldn't find it to send it back. Sent me a box with pretty much every CD she found and didn't recognize as hers, so I ended up with a bunch of disks with random crap burned on them, old driver disks, CDs from magazines, you name it, but not that one. (Not that I'd have taken up working on it again, most probably, but just saying...)

But had 2 very close calls to a potential horror story though.
One was when I was little and was messing with the menus in Norton Commander and when I saw "format" I assumed it meant layout. Somewhat luckily, it had "format c:" selected by default, and I wanted to see what happened if I changed it (again, expected to change how the screen looked), so I picked "format a:"... Lost a game I was playing at the time, which was on the floppy currently in the drive, but the HDD was safe at least.
The second was while I was living with my girlfriend, when she woke me up from a nap by placing stuff next to me in bed. I ask what's going on and she tells me that the computer just rebooted itself and when she tried to figure out why she noticed that it was overheating, so she was trying to move what was on and next to it on the desk to give it some clear air and allow it to cool better. I immediately jump out of bed, check CPU temp, see over 70C, but then when I try to put my hand on the computer I almost get burned. So turn it off right away, look inside and see that the PSU was burning hot (its cooler had died). When I took it apart, I saw parts molten inside it, but it sure was a trooper, not messing anything else up or catching fire!

That's okay, on my old forum the staff tricked some users to do that. I think one of the staffers did it too. I'm glad I looked it up though.

What Windows is it using? If it's XP then it's fairly cheap on eBay. Usually less than £30 or so.