System Crash - Lost Data

Question

Hey, just about half an hour ago, my iBook completely froze up while I was both A) copying a folder from my Mac HD to an external drive, and B) burning a DVD.
I let it sit there, frozen, for about 10 minutes but the status didn't change, so I shut down the computer by holding down the power button, then restarted.
Now there's over 30 GB of data missing from my hard drive, a bunch of items which I deleted have been restored, and the DVD disc I was burning is not recognised.
Thankfully, the external drive is still there and I had copied my documents to that before the crash.
The only problem I have with this crash is that I had four DVD image files saved in my Movies folder. They are no longer there. I need to restore those files, since they are the backups of several DVDs which were ruined. I hadn't burned them to disc yet (was in the process). It would **** the living **** out of me if those movies are just...gone.
How do I restore my computer to what it was like before it froze up and I manually restarted? The information it has now is what the drive was like a few days ago. There've been many changes since then.
Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You may be able to restore the information to an external hard drive with Prosoft Data Rescue:
http://www.prosofteng.com/
And make sure when burning to DVD you have enough space on the hard drive to burn to DVD in the first place. While with 10.4 it no longer creates a mirror image of what you are about to burn in its burn folder, it still needs enough space for all the aliases of the files being put on the hard drive before the burn takes place.
Hey, just about half an hour ago, my iBook completely froze up while I was both A) copying a folder from my Mac HD to an external drive, and B) burning a DVD.
Also don't try to multitask while burning DVD or backing up your data, burning DVD takes a lot of computer processor time, and attempting to multitask while doing so may yield many situations where the machine looks like it has hung, when in reality it is just processing data in the background and needs time to catch up. And multitasking while backing up means your computer will be attempting to backup a file that may be changing while it backs up, and might get confused which version of the file you want to be backed up. Now the machine may finally figure it out, but only after you have stopped multitasking.