I think I might've lost my main HDD and everything in it.
Added 2023-08-09 23:06:19 +0000 UTCI wish I was joking.
Recently, my PC has started to show signs of poor health. That has manifested a couple times through blue screens. In the past few days, however, they got more frequent, until I started getting one every single day for the past four days. I even (completely in vain) created a restoration point in case anything bad happened. Today, while I was working on the new art for MW for the Steam release and Itch.io, my computer just froze. Mouse was working fine, but little by little, everything stopped receiving commands. It was like a living organism that was slowly losing bodily function. It was odd and had never happened before. "CPU acting up again", I thought and just forced a shutdown. Bear in mind, that was barely five minutes after getting my daily blue screen. PC was still starting up their piles upon piles of Microsoft bloatware and game launchers. When I turned it back on, I was met with an "automatic repair loop".
Further inspection revealed to me that my Windows installation got corrupted, and so did my user data. My files in that HDD look fine, mostly, but there's no way to tell for sure. Since my W10 installation is gone, so is my restoration point. It's like climbing a wall, hooking yourself to it, but when you fall, so does the wall. Now I'm stuck here trying to figure out what to do to get my PC back in working condition. Fortunately, I have my portable HDD which I use to transfer work files between my laptop and my PC. Inside, I have every 3d file I need to work, plus, I have an extra 2 TB HDD which I bought for the sole purpose of storing my 3d files. So, I can say for sure none of that was lost. Because of that, I'm able to barely keep it together. Characters like Chloe and Fiona are heavily custom, so there's no way in hell I can risk losing them, hence, why I keep copies of them in three different places. I've been through all this "losing my files" bullshit once before and I'm absolutely not going through it again.
However, I can't be 100% sure nothing important is lost or corrupted. I have an extra 500 GB HDD my brother gave me two years ago that was just sitting in my wardrobe wrapped in paper and tape for safekeeping. I installed a fresh version of Windows 10 in it and now I'm sitting here doing damage control. While digging through my files in my main drive, I happened to find all of my MW script files just sitting in there.
That sent chills running down my spine.
Among them, was the code for my gallery and short story system I spent the past six months planning and one week actually making. I couldn't help but shout "WHY THE FUCK IS THIS HERE???" for the whole neighborhood to hear. I keep all of my work-related things in my 2 TB HDD, but I don't know what else I could've left in my main one.
I'll be doing damage control before trying to reinstall my Windows and work-related stuff like DAZ Studio or Ren'Py again. On top of that, whatever caused all of this might decide to strike back. I don't know if my main HDD is finally retiring or if the blame lies somewhere else.
My apartment is just where my body lives, but my PC is my real home. And now that home has been hit with a big ass hurricane. So, to conclude this odyssey of fuck: I'm pretty bummed out, not gonna lie. I might have lost every single one of my save games, reference pictures, some of the 3d animations I made in Cascadeur (I was really looking forward to showing you guys those), among other things I can't really remember right now. There's no way to know how much of a setback this whole situation is going to be. Rendering, compiling, and post work have been halted completely as I need my laptop to do things like creating a bootable drive and writing posts like this one. I also can't use my main PC. I want to somehow fix this whole thing and go back to working normally and that's what I'll try to do.
I'll keep you guys posted if anything changes or if all this ends up just being a scare. One can hope.
Comments
Helpful stuff. Thanks for the info! Unfortunately, I had to give up a lot of my files for the sake of creating a new partition to put a fresh install of Windows in. Trying to recover whatever was inside would've taken days and a lot of time I simply don't have to spare right now (though I tried). As for cloud services, I was using Mega last year since they have this referral thing where you get a cut of any sale made after someone downloads any of your files, so the subscription pretty much paid for itself, hehe. My loss was mostly personal, and my work files, which are what I actually needed to back up, are all safe. I saw this thing coming from a mile away and had plans to get an SSD and do some cleanup after releasing 4.1 to prevent exactly this from happening. Too late for that, it seems.
Capella
2023-08-12 19:14:01 +0000 UTCDepending how much damage there is to the folder structure of your drive, you might also be able to get some of the corrupted files back with recovery software or even a professional service. There's both paid and free software online designed to access drives like yours and recover data from them, even if it seems gone through regular Windows Explorer. https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-recover-deleted-files-2622870 has a pretty good set of tips and resources for the sort of situation you're in.
Taellosse
2023-08-10 13:36:53 +0000 UTCI know this won't help you now, but to prevent this from happening again, I recommend looking into a cloud backup service. After I experienced a similar disaster last year, I subscribed to BackBlaze. Their system works pretty well- they charge you a (very modest) flat rate for essentially unlimited data volume - as many drives as you want of any size so long as they can be accessed from a given machine. Once it's completed the initial backup (which, if you've got a lot of data and/or a slow internet connection may take quite a long time to fully upload, admittedly), a low-impact background process keeps the backup updated as you go, basically in real time. If anything happens to your local content, you can either use their online interface to re-download specific files, use the remote image to restore entire drives (though, again, limited by your internet speed) or even have them ship you a brand new HDD (or several, if multiple drives are compromised) imaged to match their copy of your drive(s). Another option to consider is Google One - they make it pretty cheap to dramatically increase the capacity of your Google Drive partition, and while it might not be cost-effective to use as a whole-drive backup, it is definitely possible to use it for a targeted subset of essential files and folders. Even if you can't afford either of those, you can still get a lot out of the various free cloud storage options if you're willing to spread things out across a lot of accounts. Mega, Google, Proton, and probably others all offer pretty substantial amounts of storage space for free and they don't care if you create multiple accounts. Some of them (Google does for sure) even let you keep multiple accounts active simultaneously, so you can assign each to maintain a live backup of different content, meaning you won't have to do anything to keep whatever those accounts are backing up current, so long as you're online.
Taellosse
2023-08-10 13:30:35 +0000 UTC
