Computer Struggles

I pride myself on thinking that I'm fairly computer literate.  I wouldn't want to have to tackle anything really elaborate, but I can find my way around the computer.  I use one at work every day and love email, blogging, and computer games.  I can do spreadsheets and all your basic things.  Sometimes I know just enough to get myself in trouble.  My husband gave me a thumb drive for Christmas.  I wanted it to transfer all my photos to, off the computer.  I'm always afraid the computer hard drive is going to blow up and I'd lose everything.  In my defense, I have copied quite a few of the pictures on my computer onto CDs.  But my whole photo organization thing is haphazard and I thought I'd put everything in one place.  Thursday morning I started coming down with another head cold, and by the time I got home from work I was miserable.  For some reason, I decided all I felt like doing was cleaning off my computer.  My daughter's computer has died, and since my husband and I were already planning on getting another computer, we are going to give them our ours.  It should still have a couple years of life in it since we just had the power supply repaired.  I started copying over some photos.  At some point the computer gave me the choice of backing up the files I was working with and, in my brain-addled state, I said yes.  Wrong move.  Apparently when I did that, the files were removed from my computer.  I lamented the loss of my photos all day Friday until the computer tech told me to try restoring them.  When I tried restoring them, it didn't work.  Now my photo program doesn't recognize them.  Ack!  I was just about to go to bed last night, totally stressed out by the whole thing, when I got a message saying files were ready to be written to a CD.  All, or at least most, of the pictures were in a temporary folder, so I just copied them back to a file on the desktop of my computer.  Some time this week I'll transfer them to CDs.  I think they are also on the thumb drive, but I don't trust it now.  From now on, all photos will be transferred directly to CD, which will also save space on the hard drive.  :)

~Jane