Left Friday night to go to DrakeCon, shut down my laptop and left it on my desk. Had a fantastic time at the con, but that is a story for later. Came home and my laptop wouldn’t boot to windows. Took it over to my brother, started running through all the tests, pulled out the hard drive and listened to it click. Shit fuck crap damn. Everything is on that drive. A couple months ago my backup drive went out and I hadn’t had the time to replace it yet. The last three years of work are lost. Gone. Most of it is still alive and well on the internet. Some of its not. I’ve lost all my source files for AYTJ?, Bear Swarm!, and some other projects I’m not talking about yet. This means all the card design I had for AYTJ? is gone, I have to start fresh. All of our music cuts for Bear Swarm! are gone along with the raw audio. I’m going to have to re-do all of it. Luckily I have next Mondays episode safe on my iPod so Bear Swarm! won’t miss a beat. This hurts. Years of work just gone with a simple click.

I’m at work now, luckily I work for a computer retailer and repair shop. My laptop is in the other room right now getting a new (much larger and faster) hard drive and Windows 7 (was using XP) so I guess I’m moving up in the world. The techs are going to see if they can’t salvage my old hard drive but I’m not hopeful. I’d rather be crushed now and start dealing with this shit then hold out hope and never get my work back. Anyway, this is really only a small setback. Most of my stuff is safe online and for the fans everything should proceed as planned. At least this has kicked my ass to get my home desktop back up and running as my backup machine again.

Update: It turns out that one of my coworker’s hobbies is data recovery. The dude is a DR magician. I might be getting the majority of my work back. We’ll see whats corrupted and gone later… if I even get 10% back I’m going to be very very pleased.

Update 2: Electric Boogaloo: As of now, it appears I have 100% of my data back. My heart is lifted and a sense of rightness has been restored to the world.