Old Timers Beware, Newbies Take note
Lost_Utopian
Posts: 112
As the title says Old Timers Beware, Newbies Take Note!!
This short story begins when I wanted to use one of the items I purchased and found the installer EXE had gone bad. Just redownload it right, NO!! Here's the story,,,
I have been around this place since at least September of 2001 and I am finding a lot of problems in my earlier purchases.
I am finding items that I know I purchased (See Image 01). And when I go to downloads page and search, the item comes up in the search results. When I click on it I get a spinning image that I let spinning for 45 minutes (See Image 02). It would not bring up the item so I cannot download it again.
I then go to my "Orders Page", (and going by the date on a corrupt file and the item picture that I downloaded at purchase) I find the the date that matches in my orders list (See Image 03). When I click on "View Order" on my orders page I am taken to a page with a HTTP ERROR 500 (See Image 04).
When I filled out a Help ticket for this problem, the Help desk wanted a copy of the receipt. I would have emailed them a reciept, but due to a HD failure the reciepts I have start in 2006. When I told them this, they replied they cannot view the order either and if I cannot give them a copy of the order they will not reset anything and the ticket was closed. I replaced the corrupted item a few weeks later for $0.38, That's right, they would not reset a 38 cent, 20 year old item because they cannot keep records any better than I can.
In checking, I have so far found 10 orders dated from 2002 up to 2005 that will not show me the order and will not give me the downloads. I have no idea how many items or what items I have now lost from my downloads. So Old timers, check your files and reciepts and Newbies, make sure to save multiple copies of everything from DAZ !!!
Cheers, Jim
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Comments
Did you try to Download with DIM or inside DAZ studio? And did you try on another day so to be sure it is not a server problem?
I experienced that some items only could be found or downloaded by one of those "channels", but i always got the items in the end. But my purchases of course only date back to 2015...
Backup everything you buy with a manual download to your own personal portable hard drive, at home, that way regardless what happens on the net, or server, or whatever, you have your content available for use.
Try restarting your browser in safe mode, with all plug-ins disabled, and see if the issue eprsists. if it does please open a support ticket - the product library page for the Staff Pack is opening for me.
I downloaded ALL my available files via DIM. Set a download path to there I wanted the files, unchecked install, and clicked the checkbox. Let that baby run until everything downloaded. It didn;t take all that long. Then i went back into
DIM and reset the download path to the correct one . This is all good unless DAZ is having server problems, but it stll should download whatever got missed the 1st time.
I feel, that not all that long ago, Daz's customer service would have been more positive.
This is why I ignored the 20% discount on a gift card; I'm pretty much done buying from Daz.
Hi Richard
I am not following you when you say "the product library page for the Staff Pack is opening for me."
Are you logging into my account, searching for the Staff Pack and having the Staff Pack page open and available for download ??
None the less, I have just tried downloading the Staff Pack on 3 other computers, this included 2 different browsers. On my internet machine is chrome, on my gaming machine Internet Explorer and on my art machine and my laptop is Microsoft Edge which is probably the first time MS Edge has been run so it's install is as clean as it can be. None the less the download attemp was exactly as I outlined above on 4 computers and 3 different browsers now.
But I will fill out another ticket for the same problem that I filled out a ticket for earlier but I'll tell them you sent me,, maybe that'll get them to look harder
Laters
Products can disappear from your product library, I had records of my complete library from before the store update in 2020, after the update I did a new scan and compared the data with the old records and found that several older products had disappeared. 5 of my 10 interactive licences were also reset to standard license. I never got any receipts for those 5 licenses which must be because of a bug in the old store, so the only evidence I have for them is the library scan records I have from before the store update.
Just checked again, these products and licenses are still missing from my product library.
Thanks for the warning, does anyone know how to download my receipts in a batch?
I'd say that if a product says "Purchased" on the product page and it appears in your product library, that should be proof enough that you own it. And the library page problem is well known, many people had this problem with many of their library pages, and DAZ fixed them.
I wrote a library scanner back then which can scan the library pages and check if they are OK, but I'm not sure if it works correctly anymore because of store changes. I'm currently running it to check...
When DAZ finally changed from .exe to .zip files, I redownloaded everything and burned all of it to DVDs
Yes, It took a long time. But I'd lost things from my product library in the past and more have gone since.
Take screen grabs of the checkout when buying new stuff is also useful.
I do this on every site I buy from.
I remember when I had a few huge cases of backup DVD's burned. When the time came I needed to use them, not a single one I tried was readable. No idea why it happened, but I stopped buying DVD spindles at that point.
I've been pretty sure for awhile that things have disappeared from my downloads as well. Because I've been buying stuff from this place since it was Zygote, it would take a huge amount of time to go thru ALL my past purchases to chase down what's not there anymore.
Quality and data life time varies a lot, even within the same brand. I've seen some batches (even Verbatim) go bad after a couple of years, while others have been fine after 10 years. It's unpredictable.
There is a type called m-disc though which they claim can store data safely for 1000 years, but they're expensive and require that the burner supports them (those that do (I have one) are not particularly expensive though).
https://www.mdisc.com/
I've had multiple issues with DAZ Customer Service wanting impossible documentation as well, and there's no denying that the once amazing DAZ customer service is... let's just say nothing like it once was. That said, I don't blame the people working in CU at all. Given how many more problems with products are being reported straight out of the gate in the forums these day and how long, if ever, it's now apparently taking for those problems to addressed, added to how prices are bouncing up and down like yo-yos, I'd be completely overwhelmed and burning out were I in a similar situation.
Until your internet cable gets hit by lightning and zaps half the electronics in your house. Yes, that actually happened to my first quad core computer, even though it was on a top of the line surge protector/battery back up. Did save my monitor though...
Years ago I found a list of orders for products that were not in my account ... but because they did not have any record of orders at their end, still would not make them available. Lots of old stuff download links lost. Some were lost during a disasterous website update long time back. I normally want to use the more up-to-date products anyways so not losing any sleep over it. "Somewhere" on a disk in a "very safe place" [you know] I'm pretty sure I have backups however yes, some of the .exe files can be no good. I do remember one that was bad but thankfully I had 2 copies of it, and the 2nd one worked.
I MUCH prefer the zip folders that most everything is packaged in now. As time progresses [i.e. OS gets upgraded], .exe files cannot always be run in the next OS. So if your backups are .exe files, might want to run them to their own zip folders for backups. There are a very few that cannot be handled that way [because they seek out the program's folder].
Yeah. I get that feeling..I know I bought that before, quite often. I'll have to look at the last batch of dowloaded files and do it again from that time.
I've had the same problem with DVDs..they don;t work later...its too bad. Now its external hard drives, but I'll be surprised if they work in 5 years. There needs to be a fool proof wayt o save digital files.
Maybe an array of raid 5 with striping with parity. If a drive fails it will rebuild when you put a new drive-in. Raid 10 will rebuild drives faster and it's more expensive.
It wouldn't need to be foolproof; it would need to be entropy-proof.
I lost a lot of stuff that were Platinum Club freebies you could download but were not in your library, I do have some like the Morphing Python I rebought (I see I got it for free with Cold Blooded) but no idea what else was there.
That was the old DAZ Free library... I don't think membership in the PC was required to access them, but yeah, DAZ starting pulling items out of it and then the whole thing went bye-bye with the first major store change and were never brought back, despite some of them, like a gun set, being needed for some of the pose sets in the store. Besides the snake and the guns, the item I remember best was a great sewer type environment set that I used quite a bit, and a few years ago someone re-posted a list of everything that was in there.
no, I actually have all of those on a usb
this was a collection of stuff for joining PC
As far as I know, I've kept all my receipts, with the oldest being from 2013.
I'd always recommend folks to keep receipts until the item is no longer useful - and with digital goods that can be a surprisingly long time.
Of course, you need to keep em somewhere safe; I've had the particular email for twice as long as my oldest Daz receipt.
It could have been a variety of things, anything from a bad writer to poor quality discs, but if it's none of those, one possiblity could be humidity... if you live somewhere with high humidity and the discs aren't stored properly the surfaces could become damaged over time... just having windows open in the summer can do it... it usually takes years... and generally it's hardly noticeable, but sometimes it could be recognizable as having a slightly darker tint on the recording side than a new disc... I've seen really bad ones where it was almost a patina.
I learned that the hard way (I live near the ocean), fortunately not with anything that was backed up elsewhere.
Some manufacturers seem more susceptible to this (and general long term degradation) than others... unfortunately I forgot which companies.
In general DVDs are best stored in "Cool, dry conditions"... room temperature is fine... but higher than that over long periods isn't great.
Morphing Python (by itself, not Cold Blooded) was on page one of the old Free Archive library:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/138971/#Comment_138971
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/569363/#Comment_569363
That's what I remembered, as there was a lot of pushback on it at the time since the python had been free to anyone prior to the introduction of the texture set, and suddenly it was a paid item. That doesn't mean DAZ didn't drop it into another collection once they un-freebied it, of course, as there used to be periodic bundlings of a ton of random content during PC promotions. The Modern Weapons set was the one I remembered that was required for some other products, yet was never replaced when the FArchive was deleted. Then again, ALL of the base DAZ figures up through the V4/M4 generation were also free for a few years prior to the release of DS4, and then the Dr. Jaekyll version of DAZ went Mr. Hyde.
yes I do have it also on my USB with all the archive zips but I apparantly bought it for $0 dollars too in the same order as ColdBlooded
so no actual rebuying as such
without access to that selection of PC+ freebies I cannot tell you what it included but it was not the Archive as most of those lost forever now, most if not all these PC+ freebies are still in the store for purchase
I believe it included the 3 bears etc too though I also have a zero order for those so maybe they just added them all to my library as they pulled the selection retrospectively
I know for certain they were not there at the time
Nothing lasts (forever).