I recently had the need to expand on my storage capacity. I had an external drive that was getting full so I bought a larger one. Because I am storing some business, financial and personal files on it, I decided to try some encryption software and had read about Truecrypt. I downloaded the software and read the tutorial. I followed the instructions, created the volume on the new drive and came up with a secure and meaningful password. I copied a few files, shut down the system and re-accessed the new drive. Everything worked fine. Did this several times to assure myself that the files were safe and, because most of them were irreplaceable, that the software worked as promised. Once I was convinced, I put all of these files onto the new drive and once again ran a test. Everything seemed fine, so like a fool, I erased all the files on my pc and the old external hard drive. The next day, I tried to access the new hard drive and got the message that I was using an invalid password. I KNOW that is not the case. I have tried everything to access these files to no avail and am, frankly, heartsick that these files are apparently lost to me forever. I suspect I am just screwed but you folks have helped me so often in the past, I thought I would get your input. Is there anything I could possibly do to retrieve this information? If not, I just want to use this post as a warning to others who may want to do the same thing I just did. It seemed counterproductive to keep these files duplicated on another drive for security reasons, but now I wished I had. Anyway, thanks in advance for any help you can give me.