You might consider putting your pinglist in an online email or document [Google documents comes to mind].
The 12K to 34,000K sounds like a MS Word trick. Joy.
Some FReepers keep their pinglist on their FR home page. You could also FReepmail the list to yourself periodically.
I hope you get the names back. Let me know if I can help.
It was quite a convoluted process, but I was able to recover the complete file so I'll be pinging the ones I missed on the earlier reply, in this reply. And yeah, it was most likely a clitch in Word, so I have since saved the file as a text file which may eliminate any quirkiness from Word.
~pinging~ those I missed earlier to unveil our 10th Amendment/States Rights resource thread.
You could ask other FReepers to hang onto a copy of your ping list. I have two others who do that for my homeschool lists. That way if anything happens to me or my computer, the lists are still available. It’s not likely that something would happen to all three of us simultaneously.