The story begins with Lord of the Rings. My Mom needed a better map to suppliment her reading, so she downloaded a six-page map from the internet. Adobe Acrobat did not have enough space to print out all six pages at once, so she moved some files around onto our secondary hard drives.

Some Adobe Photoshop files that were created by my brothers or I were placed on our hard drive and my Mom asked me to sort them. I put my files in my folder, and I put my youngest brother's single file, a scan of a Weird Al album cover, onto his.

I thought a Weird Al album cover was an stupid thing to scan, particularly one as ugly as "Bad Hair Day". So I created a folder called "Bad Stuff" and put it in.

A few hours latter, my little brother started whinning that I threw out his folder entitled "Art Gallery". Now, as anyone will tell you, the default order for files in the List view on Macs is alphabeticaly. "Art Gallery" is right above "Bad Stuff." I did not change his window size, thus it was scrolled so that "Art Gallery" was hidden from view.

I thought nothing of it, untill he had his revenge. We've had file wars before, renaming or moving folders, but this is the worst yet. My folder's (at this point titled "Stop moving my folder around") title was changed to "Stupid Jacob leave my stuff alone!". I changed it to "------" until I could think of a cool name. I wrote him a note about how naming a new folder was something completly differnent than changing an existing one. Then I opened up my folder to work on my lattest Star Wars RPG adventure (yah, I'm a gamemaster).

My Star Wars RPG folder was gone! Each of my adventures, gone! (fortunatly, I had each printed out except for the one I was working on and the ones I downloaded from the internet). Background stories for my charecters, gone! Statistics for a starship I was building for a friend, gone! Dowloaded errata, gone! Downloaded charecter sheets, gone! Game notes, gone! The list of the entire crew complement of a capital ship in my campain, gone! Statistics for NPCs (including the little brat's Jedi charecter's Master, serves him right!), gone!

What do I do when my parents and the little brat get back from a school carnival in a few hours? My current plan is to pretend nothing happened, tell my parents, then kill off his RPG charecters during a gaming session tomarrow, then recomend the he'll be BANNED FROM THE COMPUTER. or that he'll have to RETYPE ALL OF MY FILES BY HAND.

Also, are you sure he just didn't move your files anywhere else- maybe hidden in some other folder or on a disk/zip/cd lying around in his room somewhere?

Something to keep in mind for the future: both Macs and PCs have true multiuser operating systems available now. If you're going to be stuck sharing a single computer, see if you can install something which can protect your files- and don't let your little brother have administrative access to the system!

He's been grounded from the computer, and, beacuse so much information was lost, my camptain will have to fast-forward a few years to provide away to escape from all of the NPC's who's stats we're lost. I probably won't kill off his charecter, but I am going to make life very hard for him. I think he's too young to handle charecter death. Once he threw a tantrum after one of his charecers performed an action that lead to it's death after we repeatly warned him that the action would almost difinatly be fatal.