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Windows update has left me feeling broken.

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thejunglevip87

Guest
Hello all its been a while since i have posted on here but i had an error on my pc and it needed a full reinstall meaning ive lost everything, Windows 10 automatically updated itself in the middle of the night and when i woke up and turned on my pc it was stuck in a boot loop that had no way whatsoever of fixing it.

I was new to game maker but making progress and i completed 3 very small games, the problem is that whenever i needed a part in a new game and it was in an old game i would copy and paste it over from one game to the other instead of fully typing the code myself (to save time) after the reboot i have lost everything i was working on aswell as my completed games, i really am having to start from scratch. Even lost a game i was developing that i spent 1 and a half years developing, that game will never be the same as i cant for the life of me even remember where i started on that one.

Im willing to take this negative and try turn it into a positive and hope i can create that same game but better, i feel tho that i need to start right back at the very beginning and seeing as i have one of my very small games on itch.io im thinking of downloading that game and playing it to get used to the feel of it and then trying to recreate the game as a reboot with updated visuals and added extras, as it was the first game i ever made i feel that this would be a good way to do things.

what do you guys think? and before you all say i should have saved all of my data on an external HD i know that but you just dont expect it to happen and it caught me completely off guard and i will be saving every thing to a new drive from now on.
 

rIKmAN

Member
Hello all its been a while since i have posted on here but i had an error on my pc and it needed a full reinstall meaning ive lost everything, Windows 10 automatically updated itself in the middle of the night and when i woke up and turned on my pc it was stuck in a boot loop that had no way whatsoever of fixing it.

I was new to game maker but making progress and i completed 3 very small games, the problem is that whenever i needed a part in a new game and it was in an old game i would copy and paste it over from one game to the other instead of fully typing the code myself (to save time) after the reboot i have lost everything i was working on aswell as my completed games, i really am having to start from scratch. Even lost a game i was developing that i spent 1 and a half years developing, that game will never be the same as i cant for the life of me even remember where i started on that one.

Im willing to take this negative and try turn it into a positive and hope i can create that same game but better, i feel tho that i need to start right back at the very beginning and seeing as i have one of my very small games on itch.io im thinking of downloading that game and playing it to get used to the feel of it and then trying to recreate the game as a reboot with updated visuals and added extras, as it was the first game i ever made i feel that this would be a good way to do things.

what do you guys think? and before you all say i should have saved all of my data on an external HD i know that but you just dont expect it to happen and it caught me completely off guard and i will be saving every thing to a new drive from now on.
All your data would have still been on the drive - even though it didn't boot to Windows.
You could have just plugged it in to another machine as a slave and copied the data you needed off it.

I would recommend using something like DropBox or OneDrive as a quick backup solution for projects, but ideally you would want to be using proper source control when your projects start to grow.

Good luck with the remakes!
 

True Valhalla

Full-Time Developer
GMC Elder
At least your old projects served a purpose: they taught you this valuable lesson early in your game-making journey. As @rIKmAN said, I also recommend working out of Dropbox...it's so easy to setup. Proper source control is not very accessible to beginners.
 
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FrostyCat

Redemption Seeker
You should be making yourself a Ubuntu or RIP Linux live USB off another machine and using that to get your project off the boot-looping machine. Then once your data is safe, take the cue and start making periodic backups or learn source control.
 

Rayek

Member
This will sound a bit harsh, but I am going to say it anyway although you asked us not to: why oh why didn't you back up your work on an external drive, online (dropbox), or both? Let me be blunt:

NEVER EVER TRUST YOUR HARDWARE TO NEVER FAIL AND ALWAYS CREATE REGULAR BACKUPS ON BOTH EXTERNAL MEDIA AND ONLINE.

It happens to every designer and developer at some point - I learned the hard way as well, and lost most of 15 years of past work and art due to a stupid mistake I made. Basically, I had my old work stored on two drives, one failed, and I had planned to create a second backup the next day. But I made the mistake formatting that drive, and then (stupid, stupid) copied the contents of various DVDs on that second backup drive.

I lost almost 90% of past work. Client work, personal work, portfolio work, game work, development work, and so on, and so forth. Lost it all.

I now create backups every week or whenever I reached an important milestone. I use GIT to take care of versioning. I backup my work online in a safe place. It saved my butt a number of times now.

In short: back up your work as if your life depends on it. DON"T trust hardware - or at least, trust it to fail at some point. That's the extent of the bond of trust between you and your computer hardware.

Anyway, back to restoring and rescuing your work. Unless you reformatted the drive in question AND installed and/or other files or an OS on it, it should be relatively simple to copy your files to another drive, and continue working.
FrostyCat offered one solution. Another solution is to get an external USB drive bay (they're quite cheap), insert the old drive, and hook it up to another machine. Then copy your files.
 
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Wayfarer

Guest
Edit: Actually, I've removed what I've written here. I had written a post about how you can generate batch scripts to make your own backup procedure, but it's overcomplicating things since there are already tools to help you do this.

@Rayek:
Synkron actually looks quite nice! Might check that out myself.
 
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Rob

Member
The only thing to do is learn from the experience and look forward to starting a brand new project. It's unlikely that you're going to make a worse game going forward, and retyping code isn't always a bad thing as you may well learn faster ways to do it which can leak into other areas too.
 
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