Dark Mod Just Deleted my entire FMS\Venice folder and eveything in it

[Zerg Rush]

Maybe it requires one of these pop-ups with a skull and 'Are you really sure?', but not like in Windows, where there is only 'OK' as the only option

[stgatilov]

Removed the feature in svn revs 9587 and 16353.

[OrbWeaver]

On 9/8/2021 at 1:34 PM, NeonsStyle said:

Nice! I guess you're the type to kick a guy when he's down! You do that to homeless people too? What a turd! I can do a good job kicking myself, I don't need a turd like you doing it.

Sorry if I came across as snarky. I do not take any pleasure in the fact that you've lost work. It just seems so incomprehensible to me that people spend so much time working on something which is important to them, but not take basic precautions to protect their work against data loss, which is so easy to do. It's not like you need a professional automated tape backup system; just copying each day's work onto a thumb drive at the end of the day (or into a Dropbox folder) would be better than nothing.

I certainly wouldn't physically kick a homeless person, but if the reason they were homeless is that they willingly spent all of their money on game consoles and SUVs and didn't pay their mortgage, I would be far less sympathetic than if they lost their home due to reasons entirely outside their control.

[thebigh]

I suppose it's a mistake everyone has to make once. Getting told "back up your work! back up your work!" might sound like nagging and a chore if you've never experienced a hard drive failure or accidentally deleted a directory.

[Zerg Rush]

I imagine that it would not be so difficult to automate a backup every x time, many editors and office suites include this capability. There are also some apps which can do this, here are some of them:

https://www.duplicati.com (FOSS)

http://www.ukrebs-software.de (Freeware)

https://github.com/axkibe/lsyncd (FOSS)

 

Edited September 9, 2021 by Zerg Rush

[RedNoodles]

I'm so sorry this happened, please don't give up on your map!

[AluminumHaste]

That super sucks man, been there, done that. I lost nearly 8GBs worth of sounds + textures for various projects when I formatted the wrong drive. I didn't have a backup.

I lost a bunch of maps a few years later when I deleted the wrong TDM installation (I have 5 or 6 usually). Still didn't have a backup.

 

Lesson learned, I now have backups in 3 or 4 places (or was it 5????) now.
 

Try Recuva, might work. https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

 

EDIT: Oh, and how could I forget, I lost all my photos and videos of my sons high school graduation. I recorded everything on my cellphone (Samsung S10), and afterwards I had a system update to new version of Android and without thinking, told it to wipe my personal Data, lost it all, unrecoverable.
Thankfully my Ex had taken a bunch of (shitty) pictures, so at least I had those.

[NeonsStyle]

I most certainly will not be giving up on Venice. I've put too much time in it to give up.

[Oktokolo]

On 9/9/2021 at 4:23 AM, stgatilov said:

Removed the feature in svn revs 9587 and 16353.

I always thought that button would delete the entire mission folder because that would make a lot of sense when you have a mission download function.

Never clicked it though. There always where some 20+ GiB behemoths to delete when i needed space...

Would still advocate for promoting that button to actually delete the whole mission folder instead of just removing it.
Was pretty close to the correct implementation already.

[Dragofer]

41 minutes ago, Abusimplea said:

Would still advocate for promoting that button to actually delete the whole mission folder instead of just removing it.

Can't say I'm eager to put a button in there that could potentially wipe a WIP mission. There'd have to be some solid safeguards (warning messages can be skimmed and misunderstood by a busy mapper) to make sure that this is a mission that's been downloaded from the server, i.e. by checking whether the folder contains exactly a .pk4, darkmod.txt, savegames folder, and no other files like an extracted maps folder.

[NeonsStyle]

Yeh, that button has to go. There's no real need for it. 

[AluminumHaste]

I actually use it all the time with SVN.

Every time I get new binaries or compile my own, I delete the savegames from in Darkmod with that button.

But it's not a huge deal if it's gone.

[thebigh]

On 9/16/2021 at 7:13 AM, NeonsStyle said:

I most certainly will not be giving up on Venice. I've put too much time in it to give up.

Did your file restore bring back anything useful? The .map files themselves are just text files so opening them with a text editor might be useful. If you're really lucky they might have come back intact but with random garble at the beginning or end that prevented them from being opened by DR.

[STiFU]

On 9/8/2021 at 7:36 AM, NeonsStyle said:

I'd been chasing down a persistent and annoying leak without cause. The map had been fine
this morning and compiled. Later had this going on. Every previous version I tried had the same
problem. So in an attempt to solve it, I loaded TDM, loaded a different map, went back to my map,
did a cleanup and then installed my map. Go to dmap my latest v162 not found, v161 gone, 160,
159, 158 etc etc check the folder and it's all gone, all folders, models, textures scrpts everything is
gone! 3 weeks work lost and no explanation as to how it can do this???? 

I've been working for 4 to 6 hours a day for 3 weeks. OMG I've lost so much! How can TDM Do this????? 
I tried winfr data recovery but it always comes up empty, not really sure how that works. I used to be
right up with DOS. Is there no way to get it back?

This has to be fixed!!! 

I know that feeling. About 15 years ago, I had been working on a TDS map for 3/4 of a year. I lost it all due to a HDD crash, and as young and naive as I was, I did not have any backups. I was devastated! It was so demotivating that I never started mapping again...  

That tough lesson gave me absolute data paranoia. So nowadays, I do a shitload of backups. The really important stuff, like code, source files and photos, go into the cloud. Less important stuff or files too big for cloud storage (like uncut raw travel video files) are backupped to a separate physical HDD (NOT a separate partition on the same HDD!!). For this, I use the programm "Allway Sync", which can perform automated backups when the PC is idle or whenever file changes were detected.

Now I feel fairly confident that I will not lose data again. Every now and then I get an anxious feeling that my software setup might not be working anymore as intended, so I check that everything is working. I really am paranoid in this regard. 

BTW, for mapping etc. it might also make sense to use some form of version control, like SVN or GIT (with LFS). The latter is a bit more complex to learn, but has the advantage that you don't have to setup a server.

[NeonsStyle]

On 9/21/2021 at 1:04 AM, thebigh said:

Did your file restore bring back anything useful? The .map files themselves are just text files so opening them with a text editor might be useful. If you're really lucky they might have come back intact but with random garble at the beginning or end that prevented them from being opened by DR.

No. It brought back partial files, the rest of it was just garbage. The disk must've been written on. I'm never touching that button again lol

@StiFu thanks for the name of that Backup program, been looking for something just like that.

[STiFU]

No problem. Just please bear in mind that these "internal backups" won't save you from fire-/water-/lightning-hazards, so you might want to consider some remote backup solution.

[kingsal]

Ah man, that sucks.

I started building my FMs directly in a dropbox folder so it's always backed up and they keep old versions around. Its not totally ideal (has a monthly charge, isn't very robust) but its saved me big time from losing huge amounts of work.