all's well
ok, so poor annika did not know everything about my mac, but she got the basics down. The computer would not boot, I started off the system CD (Tiger) Disk Utility said there were unrecoverable errors. Since I had everything backed up on an external usb 2.0 drive (from iomega) I thought no big deal and reformatted (big fat mistake.... )
Soo.. then I reinstalled Retrospect 6.0, and tried to restore. Somehow I had screwed up the backups, so that the system, apps etc were all backed up fine, but in my Users subvolme there was only one frigging file (.localized, with 0kb... super!)
So then I tried out Data rescue X. It showed all kinds of found files and I thought all was saved. So I bought the thing. Then I discovered that it could not figure out the size of the allocation blocks and wanted my help in doing this. I assumed a block size of 8 etc etc but the files were all coming back corrupt. I should add that at first I was trying to recover old deleted data files from retrospect off the backup disk, since I knew they had my user data....
I then gave up on recovering the retrospect files, and focused on recovering files from my formatted drive. I thought this would be a big problem (since the makers of data rescue also say it is not a given that they will be able to help in such a case...) First data Rescue kept crashing after the scan (doing a thorough and content scan together... scanning for 2 hours, then crash... super!)
Then I stopped doing a content scan and only did a thorough. That did the trick - except for that data rescue x then crashed when recovering. It appears it does not like my iomega disk at all.... So I recovered to my ipod, which worked fine.
All my files are now recovered. I am restoring apps etc from the retrospect backups as I write this. The story has a hollywood ending after all (it only took three days to get this far....)
In the future I will not be so fast to format my drive while assuming that all is well backed up. And all those photos and old emails are going onto DVDs this weekend!
Thanks you all for all your help and for being nice to my girlfriend, who does not know all that much about RAID etc.....