One & All,
As I mentioned, about a month ago, a particularly nasty package of malware (4 Trojans; 2 viruses) somehow penetrated my three-tiered "firewalls" (router; anti-virus; anti-malware) causing extreme and bizarre damage (as in, I can't figure out any rational for the types and extreme nature it caused) while the 1TB external drive I was using to back-up The Archives was attached via USB.
I have professional-grade analysis and recovery tools at my disposal, and know how to use them.
Cutting to the quick, I was able to recover ~1.75 million Archive files (recall simply the number of files in a single unit folder.)
Most unfortunately and disgustingly, the Windows NTFS file structure was irreparably trashed on both my main machine and the attached back-up drive.
Those 1-3/4 million files had been organized into about 75,000 folders - and the entirety of that structure was lost, meaning I was left with, for example, thousands of files named "Attack.flc" without any way to associate them to the proper (also numbered in the thousands) "Run.flc" files.
I spent the better part of two weeks trying to recover my system without resorting to a factory re-set, both hoping to recover The Archives and other, personally pertinent items.
Adding insult to injury, almost all the compressed (.zip; .rar) files I had were irrecoverable, as the naming convention I had adapted to keep everything organized, with appropriate credits (e.g., "MonarchPreWW1B=Delta_Strife&AresdeBorg&Wyrmshadow) resulted in the vast majority of those "storehouses" being irrecoverable due to the length of their file names.
I was then tied up for a time with some extremely pressing personal matters.
I am hoping that I have a ~3 year old copy of The Archives in storage (in Manhattan, even closet space comes at a premium) which, with what's in the current d/b, would allow me to at least search for anything pertinent.
Unfortunately, as The Archive was some 15 years in the accruing and organizing, given other r/l commitments (and a lack of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) I cannot readily imagine their reconstruction (I had done quite a bit of organizational "fine tuning" over the past few years) occurring anytime soon.
... And, of course, some more salt in the wound: the not inconsiderable amount of work I'd done for "Terra Fantasia" was likewise lost.
Back To The Lone & Level Sands,
Oz
As I mentioned, about a month ago, a particularly nasty package of malware (4 Trojans; 2 viruses) somehow penetrated my three-tiered "firewalls" (router; anti-virus; anti-malware) causing extreme and bizarre damage (as in, I can't figure out any rational for the types and extreme nature it caused) while the 1TB external drive I was using to back-up The Archives was attached via USB.
I have professional-grade analysis and recovery tools at my disposal, and know how to use them.
Cutting to the quick, I was able to recover ~1.75 million Archive files (recall simply the number of files in a single unit folder.)
Most unfortunately and disgustingly, the Windows NTFS file structure was irreparably trashed on both my main machine and the attached back-up drive.
Those 1-3/4 million files had been organized into about 75,000 folders - and the entirety of that structure was lost, meaning I was left with, for example, thousands of files named "Attack.flc" without any way to associate them to the proper (also numbered in the thousands) "Run.flc" files.
I spent the better part of two weeks trying to recover my system without resorting to a factory re-set, both hoping to recover The Archives and other, personally pertinent items.
Adding insult to injury, almost all the compressed (.zip; .rar) files I had were irrecoverable, as the naming convention I had adapted to keep everything organized, with appropriate credits (e.g., "MonarchPreWW1B=Delta_Strife&AresdeBorg&Wyrmshadow) resulted in the vast majority of those "storehouses" being irrecoverable due to the length of their file names.
I was then tied up for a time with some extremely pressing personal matters.
I am hoping that I have a ~3 year old copy of The Archives in storage (in Manhattan, even closet space comes at a premium) which, with what's in the current d/b, would allow me to at least search for anything pertinent.
Unfortunately, as The Archive was some 15 years in the accruing and organizing, given other r/l commitments (and a lack of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) I cannot readily imagine their reconstruction (I had done quite a bit of organizational "fine tuning" over the past few years) occurring anytime soon.
... And, of course, some more salt in the wound: the not inconsiderable amount of work I'd done for "Terra Fantasia" was likewise lost.
Back To The Lone & Level Sands,
Oz
Meaning when the backup drive crashes you don't even have access to it for recovery attempts. "Cloud" storage maybe as a secondary measure, but I wouldn't depend on it for a primary back-up. The best guarantee of access post-disaster is a physical drive. The blank spots in my forum posts where there used to be images are due to an epic fail of an online service's servers. Any images I recovered were from my own drives. The CFC db has been vandalized more than once. The restored files were the result of months of effort by multiple people using copies stored on their local drives.
(I only appended that emoji because it was one I'd never used before 
)
