Always remember to back up your files

So I get off of work and an hour to kill before the kids come home and decide to work on my game and get distracted watching YouTube. I save my game and leave MV open and keep watching YouTube. A pop-up apears and says updating AntiVirus don't shutdown or reboot computer. It usually asks me to update as it is my settings (I hate trying to do things while my CPU is being bogged down because everything wants to update at inopportune times) but is sucking all my processing power. Wife and kids come home and my wife leaves again after saying how much time I spent on my computer (jokingly).
YouTube freezes, chrome freezes, RPGMV freezes, window still says "don't shutdown or reboot" yadayada
I wait 30 minutes and cook dinner.
Still frozen.
I *gulp* reboot and figure I'll start in safe mode.
SMART Error detected. Hard drive failure imminent, save and backup files. Press F1 to continue.

I press F1 and 20 minutes later...nothing, just a blank screen.
Try again. The same. Try again. The same. Try again. The same.
Try again start to get a huge cursor and the blue flowery window 7 screen but nothing. Wait forever for a change.
Nothing. Reboot. Black screen.

I'm fairly new to RPG Maker, 9 weeks. Had over 30 parallax maps made and remade. Awesome resources (thanks forum members!) some stuff from foreign sites that I don't remember but had a notepad file with credits plus moghunter's credits plugin.
A bunch of plugins that took forever to setup just right. Got my battle system just how I wanted it. Nearly 100 custom animations. Sprites that I had tweaked and customized in Gimp (took forever and is boring). A ton of free to use music that fit my game perfectly. Enemy images that took forever to find, plus purchased ones. Lots and lots of skills with action sequences. Like alot.

And nearly 2 hours of gameplay.

All gone. Can't afford a new machine anytime soon either.
*sigh

TLDR; Backup your stuff and often.

This is why I save direct to dropbox and work only on one PC.

Yep, I think everyone learns the hard way to back up files at least 1x while making a first project. Me, I set aside one day of the week and call it backup day, and the project is always backed up that day, unless I didn't work on it that week (which is rare, but sometimes happens).

Plus, I do a backup after major changes, like database overhauls, or finishing a long cutscene.

I copy my files to an external harddisk every once in a while, while most of the time I just save it to my dropbox. Even if your HD goes crazy and deleted your files in dropbox folder, and at the same time accidentally synced with the cloud (happened to me once!), you can still recover your files rather easily via your web dropbox account.

I'm sorry for your loss OP. It must be terrible :(

This + a million.

Have you tried taking your computer to a repair shop? They've helped me out of situations like that in the past, and it's a lot cheaper than getting a new machine.

Ah, welcome to my world. I had a major dual hard drive failure happen last year around April and lost over 15 years of saved data. My 2TB drive and my main drive. They had just about EVERYTHING I had saved up for various things over the years and all of my game projects, all of my music projects, all of my sampler libraries, games, game saves, important documents, pictures, etc. All gone in the span of 10 minutes. I only managed to save a few things because they were somewhat backed up, but 98% of it is gone forever. Never getting it back and I'm still upset about it, over a year later.

So yeah, good luck and you're lucky it was only the one project.

Bad news if you didn't understand that message.

This message is a hardware failure on your harddrive, and exactly as it tells you even if Windows was able to recover, that drive WILL completely fail soon. Basically it's a message that the HDD is near the end of its life cycle and needs to be replaced.
So you don't need a new computer (unless there are other parts of it that are also nearing the end of their life cycles), you could fix the computer by replacing the hard drive only.

But on the other hand that data is really lost, if smart errors come to the surface then no data recovery (outside of the really expensive laboratory ones) has even a chance of working.

I keep everything set up on a RAID. I had one of the hard drives fail about a year later, so just needed to replace it and nothing was lost.

Something similar happened to me.

Okay, I worked on my game (Setting up maps, arranging scripts and whatnot) and just took a break for a few mins. Saved my files, and tabbed to the forums and browse some content. After a few mins, my pc just started to slow down and freeze for a brief moment and crashed. I was like "It happens so I'll just leave my pc alone for a few hours.". 4 Hour have gone by and what was waiting for me is the nightmare of my eyes. I tried to open the editor and wouldn't let me, I panicked a little so I double clicked the actual game and yep sure enough it's all gone...

It's meh I guess, I've worked on it for a day or two so I wasn't really bothered by it but feels bad that I have to start all over again. Now, I'm more safe in keeping my data secure, just registered on a cloud storage (Dropbox) and share my progress to my friends there, it's really opened up more choices on my part as an game dev. I'm with you on this one...

Thanks for the advice everyone! It was an older laptop I bought in 2010, but I had spent some money and it was still decent (on the low end) for today's standards.

My biggest problem is I run a small side webstore business and now I'm severely limited. I had alot more than just my RPGMV assets on there. Normally I backup once a month on an external hardrive but that was giving me issues so I was going to start using USBs for different things but procrastinated.

Also, like most of you, I am addicted to RPG Maker and can't get my fix!

When creating games, make a backup every day. Lock it up in a .zip and copy it to an external hard drive and Dropbox. You can delete the old backups after a while, but make sure to have at least a handful of recent copies available at all times. If you have the space for it, download the newest backup everywhere you can for good measure. Prophecies of dying computers aside, user error can conjure deeply regrettable events and you will want to reclaim the past when grass was green and children sang.

Nine weeks of lost data isn't too terrible. If you can recall your steps and relocate your online assets, you should be able to bounce back easier than you predict. See if you can shortcut the tedious processes somehow, or better yet, reinvent them. I hope you recover the rest of your important stuff in some way, but all I can offer you are my well wishes. Life's not so bad! At least your house didn't burn down! Think about that while you sleep on your cold pillow tonight, under a comfy blanket and surrounded by family.:kaohi:

Like taking water on a hike, always reserve more capacity than you think you need. It can only help to have a few terabytes of free space at any available moment. However, be sure to keep in mind that backup drives can fail too, and make sure your Dropbox is actually updating as well. You've lived the nightmare, you need to be 300% ready or you'll blame yourself the next time something goes wrong.

If you're extra paranoid, you can make a journal of your game development journey, detailing every action you do. As a bonus, you'll be writing a diary you will surely become nostalgic about a long time from now. :3

Data is as prone to death as any living creature, so it must be taken care of like one. You'll be fine if you just remember the old saying...

10 minutes a day keeps the despair away!

Any recommendations on an inexpensive but decent computer? Normally I would save up but my wife wrecked her car last night and I needs my RPG Maker fix!

Yeesh i know the story by heart. Lost 3 years of work that way. But the hd wasn't old - the computer ran too hot and everything went to digital heaven. Even the backup hd. The old office had no ac. New office does now.
Im paranoid now and backup more often than monthly now. Core projects daily others weekly.

It doesn't matter what computer you use. I've burned through HPs Dells Acers... They all go kaput some time.

Yeah damn, dude, I havent lost projects, but i have lost thousands of sprite sheet research pics I saved to a folder on the desktop.

Now, I lost them cause I reformatted without thinking... If i had have only just taken the time to store the images in their proper destination in one of my other internal harddrives, I wouldnt have lost literally 48 hours of just right click saving... its hard to work up the motivation to find all those images again....

I hear ya, its after 3am and I bought a new laptop yesterday and I am hunting down my lost resources

Thats never fun man. When you know something exists. but you cant for the life of you find out where it is or remember the name of something that could get you closer to discovering what you need to find. Thats pain to me... pain..

I suppose on the plus side, when stuff like this happens, you get to, well, explore these relms again and its like discovering it for the first time again. almost. Ahh that train of thought kind of works better while playing games n watching movies. but ahh yup. Actually its been awhile since my story. I think you might have given me at least some motivation to attempt to grab all those resources again. Making me remember my loss.. I guess its a good thing..

i do remember a lot of the crazy sick artwork was of monster enemies in random rpg games. Lots of metal slug n other well animated games. but a lot of obscure id never heard of too..

*snip*

one good thing is i remember the site I got most of it from. Im sure yous already have stumbled across this one. but its fantastic.

My brother learnt this the hard way. He's a hi ranking government officer and had many documents on his laptop. To cut the story short, he burnt his hard drive beyond repair and the files were irretrievable. He didn't back up majority of what he had lost...:kaoswt2:

@itsMoist that link is full of rips, and we do not support rips here, as the use of rips in projects is illegal per copywrite law. Please do not post that link again.

@itsMoist I have checked the site before but like @bgillisp said, it's just full of rips and is illegal. I would like to eventually release my game and want as much original stuff as possible.