Yesterday was just a little stressful. I noticed that I was nearly out of space on my main hard drive, so I opened up my “Add/Remove Programs” dialog to see what sort of unneeded programs I could remove. I quickly spotted “Sierra Utilities” in the list. This is an irritating little utility that Sierra force-installs with Half-Life, and won’t let you uninstall it while Half-Life is still on your computer. Well, I had uninstalled Half-Life already, so I figured I’d get rid of it, even though it can’t have been more than 50 MB.
Anyways, long story short, I had 500 MB free space before I uninstalled it. After the uninstall finished, I had 7.5 GB free.
That right. This 50 MB program deleted seven GIGAbytes of files from my computer.
After some investigation, I discovered that most of my programs were gone, but miraculously, my mozilla profile was spared, which means I hadn’t lost all my email since April (my last backup).
So, I’m now running a clean new install of XP, and I’ve come within a hair’s breadth of losing all my data, which has motivated me to start doing weekly backups to my second hard drive, and monthly CD backups.
I'm a 30-year-old 
Dad ... B-) Says:
Friday, July 18, 2003 at 9:39 pm.
A suggestion
Use “Ghost” or “Disk Image” or one of the other cloning packages and clone your entire primary drive to an image file on your backup drive.
If something goes wrong, boot from your handy floppy disk, retore the clone image to your primary drive and you’re up and running again in about 15 minutes. This has worked very well for me.
Pat Says:
Tuesday, July 22, 2003 at 5:22 am.
Miss?
“It’s not a near miss…it’s a near HIT!” — George Carlin
Art Says:
Sunday, March 14, 2004 at 8:29 pm.
Same thing happen with my PC. Any word from Sierra as to why this happens?
Kaza Says:
Friday, December 3, 2004 at 1:07 am.
I had the same thing happen today, needed to uninstall a few apps so I could upgrade them for SP2. Thought I ‘d clean up a bit while I was at it, after clicking the “Remove” button in Add/Remove programs for Sierra Utilities I noticed a few minutes later it didn’t seem to be responding so I killed it only to discover almost all of my games were gone. It was recursively(?) deleting everything, luckily it didn’t get out of the Games folder & create too much damage, I’m very grateful for the Undeleting programs out there as 1 recovers my files whilst I’m typing this :D
pissed_off Says:
Wednesday, December 15, 2004 at 9:36 pm.
Similar thing just happened to me. I have a separate drive for Programs, i.e. E:\Programs is my C:\Program Files equivalent. Half-Life was installed to E:\Programs\Half-Life.
I uninstalled Half-Life, then uninstalled Sierra-Utilities. After that nearly everything in E:\Programs is gone. Some of the folders remain, but most files are missing in those remaining folders.
What a nightmare.