Probe personality is a function of three seperate systems. The first system is the hard-wired circuit paths of the actual CPU, subprocessor arrangement. This is roughly analogous to how your personality is partly depoendent on the arrangement of neurons in your brain and nervous system (for those of you who believe personaility is entirely learned, I suggest you re-examine the work done in the late eighties on Autism and attachment in infants). The second system consists of the base level code, which is stored on ROM chips. The instructions are for the most basic aspects of probe behavior, including how their motivation is structured i.e. the priority list hierarchy. This system is similar to your autonomic nervous system which operates without having to be taught. I am, of course, referring to the behavioral aspects of the autonomic nervous system, the hardware aspects are covered under the earlier comparison. The last aspect of probe personality consists of "rules of thumb" they have learned. Essentially generalizations about the world either too tedious to be programmed or too difficult. The generalizations are made using genetic algorithms and stored on a magnetic media unit. While the rules DO need to be in RAM to be used, not all of them are kept there. If the probe needs to talk to another probe all of the rules relating to communication will be loaded into memory, but the rules relating to, say, astronomy may be stored for the time being. Many, many rules can be kept in mind at any one time permitting a wide range of simultaneous activities. These rules make up all of what a probe has learned since it was activated, in a BEHAVIORAL sense. Straight memories work identically to normal computer recall. If the "rules of thumb" are all lost then, for all intents and purposes, a reactivated probe would be exactly like a probe that just stepped out of the workshop, with only the most basic of skills and knowledge. This is exactly the same as if a Human adult forgot everything they had learned since birth, they would act as they had as a child with poor motor control, no language skills, etc. Everything that made that person what they were in a software sense would be gone.
As for recovering lost data, that wasn't my department. It was my understanding that Brace-Emprise had created a program for that purpose, but I don't know if Jose or Dilyn managed to acquire it.
*Nimrod*