Howdy

Thanks for all the replies

I've been an independent consultant till this past week.  As such, I was not on the company network except to access a CAD vault thru VPN.  I do understand the importance of backups, I didn't state it at the time but I have a 4TB seagate drive that I thought was configured to do continuous backups.  It says as much, yet the last backup was from before the new year.  I have been scrambling on this project and just didn't verify that it was happening.

So yeah, now I do understand the importance of vigilance.  I don't do shady on the internet for this exact reason.

Anyways, I don't have backups of nearly any sort.  So it really is that bad.

I hear what all of you are saying, and otherwise I would not consider doing this AT ALL.  I do not want to encourage this kind of virtual extortion either, but I don't have much choice.

I've read more opinions that you'll never get your data back, and see that in a dozen articles but I have found more personal accounts of recovery than not.  Even some cop shop in Maine paid for their data back.

I was able to test it out with their "one free test" thing and I did get back one of my important files.

My antivirus seemed to stop their desktop highjacking so I never saw the popup window that says how long you have been infected but I think it's going on 48 hours.

Thanks again and I'll look thru these replies a little closer.

TB