how to recover lost files

[Sean Ryan]

Yup - been there myself.

> That's a pretty technical solution to an easy task - I knew this, but 
> hadn't been bothering becasue it's never actually happened to me before. 
> What I don't understand is why, considering I did 'copy and paste' how 
> come it's not on the original media (the removable disk) since the 
> action was not completed.

Have you considered using 'sync' as one of the options to mount.  You'll
probably need to add it to /etc/fstab.  I never did trust those bloody
auto mounters anyway.  
>From the mount(8) man page:

sync 
All I/O to the file system should be done synchronously. In case of
media with limited number of write cycles (e.g. some flash drives)
"sync" may cause life-cycle shortening.