Wow, so by losing your website (which you *should* have been smart enough to back up, so no sympathy there), you're in the same category as people who were subjected to unethical medical experimentation without their knowledge...

Is it just me, or does this not sound quite right?

Maybe there's a need to differentiate between "victims". Let's have some categories.

1) people who are acted against by someone else against their will or without their knowledge/consent, and thereby lose time/money/work/health/life;
2) people who are warned by someone else that there is a chance of something going wrong, but choose to take that chance, and thereby lose time/money/work/health/life;
3) people who lose time/money/work/health/life without warning from an event which could not reasonably have been foreseen.

Category (1) deserves the offender being punished. Victims of violence, theft, etc.

Category (3) deserves sympathy and assistance, but there's no-one available to punish. The people who died in the heatwave in France fit this category.

Category (2) deserves zero sympathy, zero assistance and zero punishment, because they're *not* victims. If you've chosen to take a risk, you can't claim to be a victim when it goes wrong. I'm afraid your loss of art off your website falls into category 2.

*EVERYONE* who has owned a computer for a significant time knows about backups. Shit happens, and if you fail to make backups, you're betting against failure. Someone who loses a bet is *not* a victim, they're just an unlucky gambler. If you were a schoolkid who'd never heard of backups, you might be able to argue for category (3) - but you're an adult with a lot of years' experience of using PCs, so that won't wash.

Graham.