My hard drive just crashed

[roguerouge]

I'm on my girlfriend's computer. I'm thinking of all of the modules that I had on that hard drive that I HOPE I backed up. But, at least I know that anything I purchased through Paizo or EnWorld has a backup for me. My Secret of Saltmarsh, however, may very well be gone forever, unless I backed it up.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

That's terrible.

I had a similar experience, but luckily most of my stuff was backed up.

Some professionals are able to pull materials off of your hard drive depending on the problems, though.


Good luck.

 

[roguerouge]

I hope so. A lot of my writing since the new year was on that computer too.

 

[Drkfathr1]

Unfortunately most of the professional services that can recover info from a crashed hard drive are VERY expensive.

 

[Derulbaskul]

I've just gone and backed everything up again recently. I'm good with my business files but had gotten a bit lax with my RPG stuff (which come to about 32 GB!). However, the decision by Wizards to drop PDFs reminded me that it was time to start backing up on a more regular basis. Good luck with your recovery.

 

[freyar]

I'm in kind of the same situation; home desktop crashed, and it seems to be the hard drive. Most of our stuff is backed up, but we've got some home movies and a few PDFs I got during Paizo's sale that weren't backed up yet. Grrrr.

 

[Festivus]

I'm in kind of the same situation; home desktop crashed, and it seems to be the hard drive. Most of our stuff is backed up, but we've got some home movies and a few PDFs I got during Paizo's sale that weren't backed up yet. Grrrr.

I never worry because I use an online backup service. I have far too many irreplacable files (read: photos of my kids / family... and now D&D modules for yesteryear) that it's worth the $50 a year to have backed up off site.

 

[Keith Robinson]

I had a double hard drive crash several years ago and I never fully recovered from it, not even to this day. I still find myself looking for files that don't exist anymore. I used to have two internal drives, one which was the primary drive and the second which was for backups - and for some reason both drives got fried at the same time, obliterating huge amounts of data, including several large and detailed maps of The Kyngdoms that I'd been planning to add, plus files and lots of other data. Several months later it occured again - wiping out two more new hard drives. It turned out there was a fault with the motherboard.

Nowadays I have have a seperate external hard drive which is solely for backups and which is disconnected when not in use. I also have a new computer

The ability to redownload my pdfs from RPGNow was a godsend, otherwise I'd have lost maybe hundreds of files, making it even more of a miserable time.

The whole thing was an extremely painful experience, so you have my sympathies.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Why is this on the WoTC PDF policy?

If my basement floods and ruins my collecton of hardcovers, is my failure to keep them someplace safe somehow WoTC's fault?

Backup backup backup... just like location location location

 

[frankthedm]

Why is this on the WoTC PDF policy?

Because they have chosen to make the legal replacements unavailable. No one said it was thier fault, but they are part of the problem now.