Major Error, cannot access admin

A few days ago, I made a major mistake. I tried to update the version of WordPress without backing up my blog. I had often backed up before, and nothing had happened. Well, this time I didn’t, and I got some weird error message telling me to contact the admin (me, of course). I get them occasionally on both of the blogs I run, and all I ever did was hit the back arrow and try again.

Well, this time, it told me that the site was down for maintenance and to check back in a few minutes. This was strange, because I hadn’t done any such thing. After trying for several minutes to access something, I gave up and went to the kitchen for a while. When I came back (15 minutes or an hour later, I don’t remember how long), I got this:

Warning: require(/home/lifeofahappymom/mybabyhaseczema.com/wp-includes/class-wp.php) [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/lifeofahappymom/mybabyhaseczema.com/wp-settings.php on line 70

Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘/home/lifeofahappymom/mybabyhaseczema.com/wp-includes/class-wp.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/local/lib/php:/usr/local/php5/lib/pear’) in /home/lifeofahappymom/mybabyhaseczema.com/wp-settings.php on line 70

No matter what url I put in, this is what I get. I mean, whether it’s my domain, http://mybabyhaseczema.com, or the wp-admin page, or what, I get this message.

I’m in the process of copying the all the files from the domain to a folder on my desktop, so whatever I do to try to fix the problem, I won’t make it worse. I have the feeling that all my posts are somewhere in those files, and that if I could just find them, I could install a clean version of wordpress (manually, obviously), and copy those files into place, and voila, I’ll be back in business. But maybe that’s not possible. My other gut feeling is that one corrupted file is responsible for the problem, and that if I could replace that one file, everything would go back to normal. But which of the fifty-billion files is it? That I have no clue!

I’m not exactly sure which version of WordPress I was attempting to update from. It might be the one before the current version; it might be two or three versions ago. I haven’t been blogging much lately, so I haven’t been keeping on top of it.

Anyone have any ideas I can try?