Hard Drive Crash !*%#@!

Well, it happened again, This is the second laptop I've had whose hard drive has failed (so I've been spending my computer time on fixing problems rather than surfing and posting).  I was very proud of myself for buying a new hard drive, removing the old one and installing the new one all by myself (I found instructions online, using my daughter's computer).  I reinstalled my operating system and drivers and updates and antivirus program, and then I went to my backup to try to restore all my data.  Sadly, this is where everything went wrong.  My external hard drive with backup program didn't come with any instructions; I plugged it in when I bought it, the program downloaded, and I worked my way through it.  I've even used it to restore data from earlier computer problems.  Unfortunately, this time, because I had replaced the hard drive and had to reinstall everything, I should have restored in a different way, but there was no way for me to know that because there were no instructions with the backup program!  Once I had connected and installed the backup disk and started figuring out how to restore from my backups, the program started an automatic backup all by itself, which rewrote the file that organizes all the backups and thereby prevented me from accessing any of my older backups.  I emailed the company for tech support, and they helped me retrieve a little bit of my data, but the bulk of it is inaccessible.  What really bothers me is that all the backups are still there on the disk, but the program cannot access them, and there is no other way to access them using another program.  BUT, I did a little more searching online (google is my friend!) and discovered that there is such a thing as a hard drive enclosure with a SATA-usb connector, so I can try to connect my old hard drive to my computer and possibly access the data (pictures and documents) that way.  I have ordered this wondrous tool and now can only hope that my old hard drive is not so corrupted that I cannot access anything at all.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed, and being very thankful that my son is a computer science major and will help me in my quest!

Shelley in CT