I'm losing all my recent work and back-ups in Time Machine as well!?

Hi,
I've only recently started having this problem with my G5 Dual 2 GHZ PowerPC. I'm running Mac OS X 10.5.8.
It has only recently started to freeze - sometimes when I open up applications for the first time of the day.
I'm a cartoonist and working mainly in Photoshop CS2. After the crash I reboot and all the files I've worked
on won't open up - I'm getting this messages: 'There was a problem reading the layer data. Read the composite instead?'
Then  'Could not complete your request because an unexpected end-of-file was encountered!'
So I've lost all the work for the day when this happens. And to make matters worse all backups in Time Machine had
disappeared! So there is no backup.
Any help appreciated. Thank you very much in advance.
Richard

For starters my hard drive is nearly full - I did delete quite a lot of stuff the other day but probably need to do more.
Your startup drive should be no more than 50% of formatted capacity and, if a small drive, have at least 40 GB of free space for proper performance of OS X and applications.
For a large drive as a boot volume, use the 50% rule of thumb.....
I don't know what a dedicated scratch drive is - but I'll find out.
Without a dedicated scratch drive, your system fills the startup drive with temporary files needed for the graphics software, eventually filling and leaving nothing for OS X to run on.
Scratch Disks
OS X will easily use 10-15 GB of "virtual memory" (this is written to the startup hard drive} and CS applications will need another 10-15 GB.
Start manipulating files and adding effects, and a 100 MB file can easily have 10-20 GB of scratch files created in a prolonged session.
Get a new, internal 1 TB drive 7200 RPM drive for scratch.
External drives can be used, but internal is faster; better performance.
If your startup drive is the original drive, get 2 new drives........ replace the startup drive and add the scratch drive.
Western Digital Black drives are most highly recommended.
Hitachi drives are also excellent.
Do not buy any type of "Green" drive.
I have a Iomega 500 gb external drive - that only has 9.3 gb available. This is set to hourly backups.
The loss of backups is likely due to the lack of free space on the startup drive.
This overly full condition disallows the systems ability to read, compare, compile and write the files to disk.
Filling a non-boot volume to greater than 90% of formatted capacity greatly hampers performance and increases the potential for data corruption and loss.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'How is it interfaced?' (Forgive me please!)
No worries.
My question is how is the drive connected; USB, Firewire, other?
USB is the least reliable due to bus demands of the system and data transfer interrupts that occur during normal operation.
Firewire is much more robust.
I did purchase a 1 TB capacity My Passport Essential SE portable drive the other day. Would it be better to use Time Machine on that?
As much as I like the internal drives of Western Digital, I dislike the ready made external drives from them, Seagate and Hitachi.
BUT, anything is better than nothing, though, for Time Machine, a 1TB drive is good enough for up to a 640 GB drive backup.
Plan on 1.5x capacity of a TM drive compared to the source drive.
I haven't repaired my hard drives lately - so will do this.
Good, but free up some space on the boot volume.

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