samba - Jun 2004 - HELP: Samba files have disappeared!!!

Recently, to help with recovering from a failing hard drive on a laptop,
I copied 20+ Gb of data to a Samba share on a RHEL 3 Advanced Server.
The copies seemed took a fair amount of time and seemed to work fine.
It is now a few days later and I am trying to restore my data to the
laptop and my files have disappeared!!!  The entire directory structure
is intact but all the files are missing.

Is this a known problem and is there a workaround?  I REALLY, REALLY
need to get these files back.  Can anyone give me any suggestions?  Any
help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Bill