In 48 hours, more than a billion bytes disappeared. I had made a fatal mistake. I thought I had backed up everything on that drive. It's only one of many drives on that computer, and I use the other drives for quick backups. I also use SyQuest removable drives and a Floptical drive.
Backups are relatively easy.
And maybe that's why I made the mistake. I had moved the entire contents of one of the partitions to another location on the big drive, and then erased the previous group of files. Or so I thought. As it turned out, that other drive started to act up. It's an old Seagate, one that has served faithfully through years of abuse.