Seriously, i had hoped not to do this on my second bloody news post.
I had backed everything up to my external backup hard drive so I could format my computer, i had one of those moments where i felt that i needed a clean install to get everything back on track.
Three years of freelance work, university work, personal work, personal photos, research and a massive texture library all went off to sit comfortably onto my nice safe external hard drive.
Much to my surprise, when I tried to boot up my hard drive to replace what I had just formatted i found that the hard drive wasn't responding at all. To cut a long story short, it had fried itself, somehow, overnight. It hadn't moved from the space I left it, but it no longer worked.
Lesson #1 : Don't buy cheap external HDDs.
I had managed to back up a few bits of university work and freelance work on some CDs but the majority of it is lost. I have also sent off the HDD to various data recovery companies but a lot of them wanted a massive amount of money for recovering things that were of no importance to me.
Lesson #2: Everyone will try to rip you off.
Whisper is gone, years and years of research that went into developing the story is all gone. Sure, i have it in my head and i still have a lot of paper research. Whisper is quite a personal story for me, so to see all that go to waste was horrific.
This project isn't cancelled, but more on hold until I can find the time again to rewrite the script and get myself back up to scratch inside UDK. It might even turn out better than I had hoped!
Lesson #3: Backup! Backup! Backup!
Cheers,
Adam.
F
U
C
K.
I hate UDK. Not taste, consistency.
Holy crap, that's some very bad news. I'm so sorry for you, I also had a similar experience a year ago, it was horrible. I hope you recover at least something. Good luck, man, and don't give up.