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There's always hope for the dedicated and creative mind. And I believe you are. Also with your potentials starting a patron may not be a bad idea it may work.
As for me the CG hobby started when I was a child with a used Amiga 500. That here in Italy was very expensive anyway at the time. Then I went trough all those new and exciting stuff since today where I mainly use blender and daz. It stills a hobby since my job is as IT professional. And I feel lucky that I actually got to save all my works from the prehistoric A500 since today. But in the end I believe it was more the journey itself to be fun, rather than what I realized passing through.
And who knows what the future may donate to us yet.
Worse than that.. it's been lost.. irrevocably.. (well, barring any super expensive data recovery).
But if we're dealing with far fetched what if's.. what if you started a gofundme, sell advance copies of the book to pay for the data recovery, recover the data, get a backup drive, and self-publish.... a pheonix from the flames!
I just deleted the backup copy of 200GB of DAZ DIM zip files because my 1TB drive is full of YouTube videos. Now a 5TB external USB drive can be had on Amazon for about $120 and I hope to get one in the next year but until than I hope my internal 2TB drive than all my DAZ stuff is on doesn't give out as I really don't want to guess how long it'd take DIM to download all that again!.
I had last year a 2TB drive give out & while it is possible to pay and often get much of the drive recovered I haven't bothered inquiring because i'm pretty sure it is super expensive and there is actually only a small part of it I want to recover anyway.
Oh Kyoto, sorry about your loss.
I highly recommend saving that drive, reagardless your future plans.
Odd sounds and non-readable drives can occur from failures of the system controller, drive controll (the drive circuit board), and the disks themselves. If it's either of the first two events, your data may well be in perfect shape, even if invisible to you. Save the drive and please be careful with it.
I had a failure of a drive, where I bought an exact copy of the drive model (should be relatively inexpensive, even a working second-hand version will do- so long as it's the same model number and it works), I then swapped the circuit boards and was able to see and save my data (and backed it up very quickly). It took a special torx screwdriver from a friend, but was otherwise pretty simple and obvious what-went-where... and we never had to actually open the drive casing.
Bottom line: It's completely understandable to feel resigned to your bad fortune today, but some sunny morning in a week or month, you may awaken with a bit of a money buffer and some caffiene induced motivation, and feel like taking this on again. Save the drive and please be careful with it. You may even bump into someone who can help and knows some tricks. If you recover it, you'll at least have a choice!
Best to you, and thanks for all of your general contributions to this community. It would be truly sad to lose you, especially if that data is more available than you think it is! Save the drive!
be well,
--ms
...this was intended to be a heavily illustrated story, not quite a graphic novel, but more like an old storybook with lots of illustrations. Just to rebuild all the characters from scratch alone will take close to a year. Then there are the settings.
I am also not a business minded person nor am into marketing. I am a story teller and illustrator. I just want to tell a story. I don't have the funds to pay an agent or attorney while print publishers today are looking for that "instant seller" and lie Hollywood, don't care to take their chances on someone or something "new".
Try to hit the pause button and let the heat of the moment pass. I know it’s frustrating and I’m not saying it’s easy, but upon further reflection you may find that it was/is the journey that is important anyway.
Learn from it but try not to dwell on it - carry on!
- Greg
...viruses were not the cause, just obsolescence. Again, when I built this system large capacity HDDs were expensive I was fortunate to afford a 1 TB and 250 GB dual drive setup on my budget. I bought the best most reliable hardware I could afford at the time. Now I find myself being criticised for my lack of financial resources.
The only way I can upgrade to the newest technology is to win a lotto jackpot, I have a better chance of being struck by lightening twice. I've done what I could given my financial situation, but unfortunately yes, machines eventually "give out". If you don't have the budget to upgrade as I don't, you are at mercy of mechanical failure.
...not easy to do when this is your only creative outlet left.
Not at all.. it's why I mentioned the free alternatives.
Again though - theres nothing stopping anyone upgrading after the fact.. I have to ask, did it not cross your mind say a year ago... 6 months ago.. whatever.. I should really look into backing this stuff up? It was a ticking time bomb and you've sadly paid the ultimate price.
I mean sure, if you're not in a position to afford a backup solution you kinda owed it to yourself to look at the free options out there, and just swallow the potential risk (but mitigate them the best you can via encryption).
...since 2013 when I lost my job I had little to no income to support such purchases. UI expired at the end of the year, and what little money I came into afterwards had to go to keeping a roof over my head, the heat/lights on, and food on the table. I nearly ended up on the streets.
Also back then, the services we had here where I live cost.about as much if not more than a new drive.
You keep mentioning 'back then'.. but time moves on, and things change/get cheaper. There are free services available now.. so anyone who hasn't got a backup, and can't afford one, who value their data really have no excuse not to take advantage of that to afford at least some protection against the inevitable.
I'm not trying to kick you while you're down. Just trying to help others so we don't see posts like this in future.
...all of this talk is, as I mentioned, water over the dam.
What I am looking at is weeks of reconstructing my library/runtime structure and after that at least a couple years of recreating my characters and scenes from scratch. This is what is making me just want to ditch this all in spite of the both the time and financial investment I have in it.
This.. :)
What do you have to lose by starting over? You said yourself, this is your creative outlet. You've learned a lot since you started building your assets and I bet you can do it WAY faster than the first time you did it because now you know exactly how to do it and what exactly you need (there's not nearly as much trial and error the second time around). Plus, what would you be doing instead? Does what you would be doing instead sound much better than creating your beloved characters again? If so, then yeah, do that other thing if it will make you happier. :) Do what makes you happier.
Either way, you don't have to decide right now. Give it a day or two, think on it. You still have all your assets here at Daz ready to be downloaded when/if you are ready to start fresh. :) Things seem really bleak and bad right now, I'm sure - but know that it's never as bad as it seems at first. This might be just the opportunity you needed - a fresh start, a clean slate, and the chance to maybe do things in a different way or try something new that otherwise, you wouldn't have. *hug*
If you do decide to start over (and I hope you do!) Save the bad drive.
When you get some of your rework done, maybe just some test scenes with your rebuilt characters or something, some work to show what you can do. Start a crowdfund and share some of the new stuff in it. It's possible you could get enough from crowd funding to send the drive off to be recovered. Even with the ticking (which indicates read arm) the recovery team will open up the drive, remove the disks and use working parts to read from those disks.
You have a lot of friends here, and friends here have friends. What could it hurt to try a crowd fund to get your 6 years back?
Then when you do, consider google drive or one drive or dropbox or something to at least back up your scene files. Even if you get hacked and they get your scene files, there's nothing they can do with them unless they go and buy all the resources in those scenes.
My general advice for anyone undertaking long term,multi year projects is as follows,:
Build the finished pages,or animated scenes( in my case), in a linear fashion
creating the finished delivery format incrementally over time as opposed to waiting to until all of the Illustrations (animated footage) are done with the plan to assemble it All together someday in the distant future.
For example My long term animated movie project "Galactus Rising" is now 58 minutes long and represents five years worth of Character animation,rendering post production work as final rendered sequences of various lengths .
That is, I have a 58 minute long Apple final cut pro project file that contains over 20 HD final animatedfilm clips that are backed up in two different locations
thus that 58 minutes I have so far ,are literally the first 58 minutes as they will appear in the film.
All of the Iclone ,Daz ,animation scene files, After effects VFX project files and custom genesis Characters and stonemason scene prop set ups in C4D etc etc ,from the early parts of the film are long gone...Deleted by me mostly
Including the Raw original uncompressed targas rendered out of Maxon Cinema4D
They have been rendered to finished HD clips residing in Final cut that tell my narrative thus far.
To the OP : what was your final Delivery format for your "Illustrated Picture book" and why were no pages already laid out with
with your story text and rendered images ??
I assume you were writing the story in Chronological order
Did you not render anything of those saved characters??
Had you built, even a very rough layout for each finished book page with copy fitted text and
rendered the images, linearly over the last six years,
you may have had at least a partially completed product that could have been easily backed up routinely even on removable thumb drive media, instead of one that has been effectively Aborted by this massive data loss.
Just my opinion.
why were no pages already laid out with
with your story text and rendered images ??
That's why this is a weird predicament.
a) You were going to release it any-minute-now and it just happens to go right near the end......OR
b) You were/are far from finishing and you would have spent another six years- still working on it....[I'll come back to this]
c) No one that you know was ever sent anything to do with this? No one proofing or editing? You never shared an idea - sent a sketch/email/text or test render/solicited an opinion so that NO ONE has ANYTHING that can help you get back on track?
d) You never told anyone- any of the details - that you could quickly jot down and get the basic outline back? If you took the time to just explain WHAT you were working on, that would be enough to start up again.
e) Six years ago, you probably weren't using Iray and had to do a bunch of stuff over - or if not, take advantage now and make it look different. What's a step above your previous renders? You MUST have gotten better since day one, six years ago. If you could start all over again, certainly you can generate better ideas and art now.....
------
Back to b) If you REALLY, really spent Six Years working on something and NEVER shared any of it - for all the fears you mentioned - then I go back to my feeling that this is a blessing. NONE of those remote fears that kept you from arriving and starting to release content is worse than this...
So now, maybe it's time to break from all the excuses and DO IT. Make chapter One and then start chapter two and once you get to three or four, time to start releasing it.
If you are by yourself, it will be WAY HARDER to build momentum when the whole thing is done.
I suggest the next time you do this novel, you live it, in almost real time, and let your fans grow with you.
Dole it out in chunks and garner interest.
------------
When I first installed Daz, it was tough to get around my comic only being digital. I came from a world where the paper version came first and you turned it into a digital scan.
When I did comics from photoshopping videos, it felt real because I acted out all the scenes.
I printed out some of the Daz renders so I could come home and see my artwork all over the place. It was inspiring to see my art stickied to the wall or just loose images, laying all over the place....
I suggest you do different this next time around.
f) If you do give up, then my earlier theme smacks true- that it doesn't count when it only sits on your hard drive. You giving up and quitting is no different than all that material sitting away on some drive somewhere - never to be seen.
This is a blessing. I believe your someday just turned into a real day and a real date to aim for.
Set an actual goal for a release date and start working towards it.
That ticking sound reminds me of the "click of death" I had when my hard drive died a decade ago (it was like 100Gb or something like that if that gives you a timeframe). Anyway, one suggestion I found online was that the controller board might be bad and it could be fixed by buying an identical drive(going by part numbers) and just swapping the control board. So no need to open the drive or anything. I didn't do it because nothing on the drive was that important to me, plus it wasn't a sure fix and I didn't want to spend the money.
I'm not saying that's the problem in your case, but you never know. It won't hurt to do a Google search with your symptoms and HD model to see if this is a common problem that can be fixed. They sell 100's of thousands of these things; guaranteed other people have had the same problem as you.
Sent you a pm email. Don't give up yet!
Data on Fat or even NTFS formatted HDDs can generally be recovered but a disk can not be repaired. It is just a question of money and you should try a crowdfunding operation. Some of us may help you, so let us know.
Wether you get your data back or not you need to save your data in the cloud. If you fear someone may use your data then encrypt your files. There is plenty of free Cloud storage available. I use Onedrive and Dropbox who both offer free space. Some carriers also offer free space. I mostly use Amazon drive but this is a paid solution. Your HDD failed and a new one will also fail after a while. Get some disk maintenance software that can tell you the global state (SMART parameters) of your HDD. That kind of soft is mostly available for free and really not hard to use.
I feel ya KK, I'm sorry to hear your content drive died. I know how it can be having to rob peter to pay Paul to get by day to day. I had those days going through college. I sure hope you can recovery some of your content through your purchased downloads, that should get some of your stuff back . But loosing projects and old content you created yourself is very heartbreaking in deed, really just the worst!! been there done that. . I'm not one to preach the importance of doing back ups, I am sure you did worked with what you had and knew the risk. its unfortunate that circumstances sometimes dictate our fate beyond our control.. Good luck
+1
I don't have time to go into details right now, but there is software available that would let you recover all, or almost all of you data, even if your FAT is hosed (if the drives spins up, and the head is still "working"). IIRC there are even some free and open source versions available, but you can get easy to use commercial software to do it for less than $100.00. The key right now would be to stop powering up your drive until you get the software and a drive to copy the recovered files to. I have done this several times to recover data on drives the killed their own FAT's, it been several years since I last did it, but it can easily be done.
What did that fail message say? If it is bad sectors which may be the case considering the symptoms, data may or may not be recoverable, depending on the state of the platters. But if the problem doesn't involve damage to the data layers on the platters, your data is still there and can be fully recovered one way or another.
I am always inspired by the story of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) who, while changing trains at Reading, lost his only manuscript of "Seven Pillars of Wisdom". So he just sat down and rewrote it - all seven hundred pages!
I feel for you. A long time ago, I had a lot of my writtings get wiped out by a virus. Ironically, my mother gave me the floppy disk that infected my system. I never accepted another peice of digital media from her again.
Even HD's that have been in a fire can be (party) recovered. Try to save up, or make some $ on the side for a data recovery. I accidently wiped a 500 GB drive, just because I was tired and wasn't paying attention when I was formatting a disk. I tried several software (they all have a trial version) and was able to get everything back. Took me days, but I managed in the end.
If your HD is faulty though, you may indeed have to make use of an external recovery service. Don't toss the HD, you might come across a moment you will have some extra pocket money and get your long years of hard work back!
I've synced my drives with online backup storage now. I also tried working with a NAS but I had some weird bugs that I was unable to get rid of, so I sold it.
You >>>might<<< consider putting the drive in a freezer for about 30 minutes and see if cooling it down will make it more readable. Understand, if left in the freezer too long, you get condensation and it can cause rust, so be careful and be ready to back it up if you can read it, right away. For now, the key is not to turn it on until you have a new bootable hard drive in the system, or a bootable USB key and a way to back up the data. Take a little while to regroup, be patient. You may save your data if you don't get impatient with it. I've been where you are, so I know the frustration level can be incapacitating after all that work.
Good luck. I hope it works out.