All is lost!

[The Emilien]

Wow guys I'm stunned here. In one foul swoop my life's work is gone. All the assets I've accumulated over the years, all the art I've made... all gone.

Today my external hard drive fell from about a foot, that was enough for everything to be destroyed. I plug it in but it doesn't read. I can hear a slight hum nut that's it. Every single thing is gone.

So I guess the moral of this story is, please guys and gals, please back up your hard-drive on other hard-drive periodically. Thank God for this place, I will eventually recover... but I had a My Library that was well over a TB (Last I looked).

Thanks,
Emilien

[yngvarr]

I don't think that falling from a small height will cause a complete loss of data from the disk. You should take it to the service center, where they can restore it.

[YanOma]

I keep all my assets on a 4TB SSD, though I back it up every 3 months to an external HDD, I also keep around a TB of assets backed up to OneDrive.

[Grouchy Old Fart]

Two external USB3 disks... and a NAS. I have decades of 3D assets, so I don't play around when it comes to backups.

[Father Mapple]

open the case of your external drive, take it out and put it in a docking station, maybe it's just the controller of the external case and the hdd is still intact.

https://de.sharkoon.com/product/14057

and for the future, ALWAYS MAKE BACKUPS !!! ALWAYS !!!

[enjoyify]

There is a small upside, however. Your characters will load into scenes SO fast now!

In any case, thanks for the reminder. I really need to increase the frequency of my backups.

[Father Mapple]

There is a small upside, however. Your characters will load into scenes SO fast now!

😂 ... this is a good one.

[The Emilien]

I appreciate that haha! Got to find some levity in terrible situations.

[Frank21]

Hey techies - what's the best way to keep your runtime backed-up? Is there any prog that just updates changes since your last backup? Backing up content is easy but runtimes have files all over the place.

[Amber]

@emilien
Sorry for your loss, I've been there a few times myself. I've dropped a HDD from only a few inches and crashed a head. Once an armature makes contact with the platter, game over. The head's alignment is whacked, and the platter itself takes permanent damage, even if it's not visible to the naked eye.
I bet it's making that grunting, clacking noise, the Tick Of Death.

For this reason, I've been migrating what I can from my still-working mechanical drives to solid-state. You can basically play tennis with those, and no problem.

@enjoyify
ZING!!

@frank22
Well, there's a few good options; one would be to a backup utility like Macrium Reflect, which not only backs up entire drives and systems, but can do differential and incremental backups of individual folders and files as well.

My favorite would be to use Git. Make your library a repository, and do an initial commit.
Then when you add or remove junk, make a commit, and it will keep a differential of the repo. It also does not grow appreciably in size like making copies of files would. The best benefit is, you can revert to any snapshot you have, anywhere in time. Make branches, merge branches, whatever. Treat your runtime like source code. Version Control FTW!
If you've never used Git or any other versioning system, it might be a bit tricky to learn, but the principles are pretty basic.

[enjoyify]

I also use Macrium Reflect. It's straightforward and light.

The Git idea is interesting.

[Father Mapple]

Hey techies – what’s the best way to keep your runtime backed-up? Is there any prog that just updates changes since your last backup?

i'm using this since years ...

synchredible

completely free for personal use

[Frank21]

Thanks for those suggestions everyone.

[Bzzzzzzz]

I am using freefilesync. I have a total of 154TB external HDD. Every EHDD has a clone. If a HDD falls then it is not such a disaster.

[Abad]

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