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Hi Anne,

Sorry to hear you have had this issue with your files and so on. Your data may or may not be in any kind of a recoverable state.
It is likely that some of it still actually exists on your disk, but recovering it may be all but impossible. If you have (possibly a
great deal of) money to spend, and time to wait, you might consider sending the disk to a professional data recovery service.
I feel quite certain that there must be one or more companies specializing in data recovery in Australia.

I sincerely hope you have backups of anything that is truly important to your life.

My main advice would be to abandon Microsoft products altogether. Do a little looking around on the net for Linux
distributions (I favor Red Hat and SuSE - but there are many, many other fine distributions - all available for free).

Ask people you know which Linux distribution they like...

then... install Linux on your machine. In my opinion, well over 99% of the un-necessary technical problems associated with
personal computing can simply be avoided, by avoiding Microsoft products altogether. The Microsoft stuff is (in my opinion)
truly crap.

Will there be a "learning curve" for you to run Linux? Yes. If you are not already familiar with Linux or some other UNIX-like
operating system, there will be a relatively small learning curve to make the switch. Can you do anything with Linux you can
do with Microsoft stuff? Yes. And then some... and a whole lot more.

In the end, you'll have something that works a whole lot better that will not write poop all over your disks at the worse
possible time. And in the process, you'll learn a great deal about computing that vendors like Microsoft would rather you
didn't even know.

Like how to do it like an adult.

Sorry again for your trouble. Hope you get it squared away.

Regards and Happy New Year.