I'm back at it (and counting my losses).

After hours of backup and (failed) recovery, one huge mess up on my part, and 700 gigs of corrupted data later, I have my PC all ready to go. I backed up whatever I could, but because of one stupid mistake (and a shitty design choice on Microsoft's part), I lost everything in my main HDD. I also lost a huge chunk of my user data since, for some reason, only the 'local' folder of my 'AppData' folder got copied over. As far as those 700 GB of data go, I can do nothing but hope they were made of games and be less of a hoarder next time.

-My Cascadeur animations were lost.

I was stressed out and doing some cleanup in my 'Documents' folder so I could back up only the most important stuff and ended up deleting everything that wasn't inside a folder. Which means my Cascadeur animations I dedicated dozens of hours to. I'm still a little sad I lost the data, but I still have the experience. I learned a lot of new different motions and techniques I can not only apply to Unreal Engine games (which is what I intended) but to DAZ animations, too. Like changing keyframe interpolation, for example. I discovered that a lot of the "jittering" that happened in my animations was due to me using the wrong kind of interpolation for certain body parts, causing them to move at different speeds. Bad news is that I lost around 8 or 9 animations. Good news is that I can make new and better ones next time.

-My entire "Local Disk C:", was lost.

I had years of programs and tools for every kind of problem one can find on a computer. They're all lost now.

It's hard for me to convince myself that "oh, it was all made of games" when I look at my secondary drive and see I have most of my Steam games inside, including my 150+ gigs of modded Skyrim and modded Fallout 4. Right now I feel like I'm in a horror movie just waiting for the jumpscare. Just waiting to look for that one important thing I needed and realize that "oh... that was lost too".

I'm stunned. I guess that's the right word. I know exactly what I need to do now to keep the ball rolling, but right now I just feel kinda drugged up. I don't know how to explain it. It's a sour feeling reaching for my bookmarked stuff and realizing these ones are from December 2022, or opening anything on my main PC and realizing I don't have .Net Framework installed. I'm too used to having everything on my computer run like clockwork, and for me to have all the tools I need and know where it all is. Hopefully, I'll get myself back into form and work on MW still today. I want to release the next update this month, after all.

At the end of the day, I can't complain much. My PC's been needing this cleanup for years.

Still here.