UPDATE: Drive Failure and Taking a Break

The updates below are taken from my original posts on Discord, and as such probably have whack formatting. There’s a tl;dr at the end.

I have some massive, very sad news. I think my D drive might have had an electrical fault and fried itself last night. I went to my local computer store to try to recover the data and they said that the process to bring it back was beyond their abilities. I'm going to a larger store tomorrow to see if they can do anything, and if that fails I'll have to ship the drive off, god knows how long that will take. Everything I had as an artist was on that fucking drive. Commissions are suspended, obviously.

Update 1: As I was about to crawl into bed and cry myself to sleep, I remembered that I stored one more external drive in my firesafe (most of my old drives that held nothing are in my closet so I hadn't thought to check). I'd used it to back up my Daz library back on December 8th, 2021. It's got all my 3rd party stuff and most importantly, all my main characters in their post rework bodies. THIS I can come back from without losing too much stride. It's gonna suck mondo dick to lose all of the reference images and programs I used, but those are easily replaceable. Redownloading all my 3rd party Daz assets and remaking all my characters would have taken MONTHS, and now it's not something I need to worry about. There's a sliver of hope yet.

@everyone UPDATE 2: Drive is *Not* Safeu

Took the drive to a more advanced computer shop today. The manager tried his damnedest to rip everything he could, but he said the drive was so corrupted all he could get out of it were the folders and a couple images, everything else would cause his Linux computer to lock up. He said that since SSDs so rarely fail due to electrical issues whereas HDDs failed all the time and could be easily recovered, SSDs have barely any protection at all. In short, the drive is 99% fucked.

The only other option I had available to me was to send the drive off to a company specializing in data recovery. Not only would this be absurdly expensive, ($300+) but it makes me incredibly nervous giving (not just giving, MAILING) my sensitive data to a random company. All the more so because the manager (who was a really dope dude in general, he looked like a chubby AVGN and gave off Alpha Nerd energy) mentioned when I called him that he was trying his best to extract the info from “AsusGamepad_4_0_0_9,” which is the secret homework folder that I kept all of my shit in. I don’t have any CP, but the absolute last thing my sanity needs is DriveSavers calling me up and telling me they’re turning my drive over to the FBI just to be safe because they don’t know where all my 3d loli falls.

However, there is a silver lining. The manager was able to get my *folders* copied over to a new SSD, even though the files inside are all corrupted. This is actually a MASSIVE help, as it will be able to show me what stuff I’m missing and where I need to go to redownload everything. I’ve still lost a lot, so here’s what we’re looking at:

What I’ve lost: 90% of my Commission and Personal Art reference images, all programs related to my art and a lot of basic programs my computer used like 7zip and Irfanview (All of these should be easy reinstalls with the possible exception of Daz), the past 6 months of Daz models I’ve created (so no models made during Fanart February or LoliMay), and the original PSDs of all art.

What I’ve recovered: All Daz program content from before 12/8/2021, all my images (backed up on MEGA).

So what’s next? I’m going to talk to Seagate and the UPS’s customer service and see if I can get a refund or a replacement. I’m also going to shell out the dosh to get a supermassive external hard drive and religiously back everything up onto it every single month. I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to rebuild my Daz archive – I “bought” a lot of 3rd party stuff and I want to get as many of them back as I can. Like I said, I have no idea of a timeframe, but my best guess it like 3+ weeks until I’m back up and running fully.

This ain’t the end, it’s just a pretty bad setback. Back. Up. Your. Data. On PHYSICAL media if at all possible.

Tl;dr: My D drive took a shit and I lost a ton of files related to my 3d art so I’m taking a month-long break in order to redownload as much as I can.