Folder turned into a 32KB file; multiple culprits; what to do and not to do

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Yesterday, to my dismay one of my folders in both my original and backup hard drives got turned into a 32KB folder, and i've been spending all night and almost all of today trying to restore it back to a folder with my files intact. I even used freeware data recovery and file undelete software to restore it, but none of them worked. Finally, I used TestDisk, and since I was new at it, one of those mistakes cost me my original hard drive, thereby made it unreadable on my desktop PC. I unplugged and plugged it back in, but all to no avail. I must've overwritten it by accident, but now it cost me my data that's on it. However, all isn't lost as I still had a backup, but on two different, other hard disks, but I got a lot of backups to make. Lessons learned: -Never, EVER use Testdisk because you'll end up having a dead, unreadable hard disk drive if you make a single mistake on it! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk) (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) -Never, EVER use Chkdsk or Scandisk unless it's a last resort, because it turns your folders that have your data into 32kb files, and there's no guarantee what will happen to your files. This is what happened with one of my folders in one of my hard drives. -Speaking of which, never plug in your USB hard disk drive before Windows starts. -Avoid Allway Sync at all costs because it either moves your deleted or modified files to the recycle bin, or destroys them altogether by shredding them unless you reroute them to your My Documents folder in the C: drive. (http://www.allwaysync.com/) -Always, always, F****NG ALWAYS buy backup external hard disk drives and back up copy of your files! Extra external hard drives are always worth it. -Never, EVER pull out the USB plug without safely removing the device first!