Have You Ever Lost a Significant Amount of Your Doom Creations?

Long story short: several months ago my PC's hard drive crashed and I lost several hours' worth of mapping. Just a few days ago, I thought I had lost a night's work. I back up pretty regularly, so I should never lose an unbearable amount, but I was just curious if anyone has any horror stories about entire megawads gone or something crazy...

Yes, 2 times.

The first one was from 2014. Years ago I used to rely on a website called fileden, never thought on using another method (even tho I knew way better options). So my account was created in 2011 or 2012, and in 2014 fileden closed, but weeks before that they sent an e-mail encouraging all useres to download and save their files. Stupid me never bothered on checking unread e-mails, because my main e-mail account had like 8K unread shit, mostly facebook things, so didn't realize there was a fileden message. Basically lost around 70% or 80% of all maps, mostly old, experimental, weird shit (mainly zdoom), they were kinda crappy,  but meant a lot to me because they were like practice creations, nothing too fancy, but unlike now I used to have a blast mapping and playing them.

in 2017 I forgot to save my wad folder and lost around 4 maps I had been working on.

Shit happens

Stupid me happens

Slade3 had a habit of occasionally purging every file in the folder I had for doom wads. Irretrievable. So I made another folder called SafetyZone and now all my wads are there. If I want to modify a wad in Slade I copied and pasted to the original folder for work.

Also, I usually send wads to my brother so he can play test them. So he usually has a copy of beta and finished wads

Odd. I never encountered this problem with SLADE3

Yeah, around 2010 I had mapped a wad that had 10 maps, then I formatted the pc, forgot to save and then ended up with only 3 levels lol

Nope. I'm using backups both on external HDD and cloud storage.

Two or three months ago I created my first 'maps' (though rooms would be a better description) in Doom Builder, and when I tried to load them a week or so ago, it told me the wads no longer existed. I was completely baffled by this and assumed the program must have malfunctioned and 'lost' or deleted them. It was only when glancing through the contents of my recycle bin that I noticed a ZDoom folder, and on checking its contents found the wads. I'd deleted my old ZDoom folder a few weeks earlier, without realizing that this was where Doom Builder saves its files to. 

I had some fun silly Skulltag maps I made on an old computer (one of which was like my own hangout place where I made a room for myself with a pet archvile in a cage). I tried getting them again from the hard drive using a new computer but it wouldn't work. I guess I need some kind of special device to get the files from it that I just remembered is a thing.

Lost every my shit-wads I did in 2007-2012. Due to totally died PC due to the power surge. HDD, motherboard...everything.

But that not so bad event in my life, to be honest. It's a coolstory I'll tell...someday...maybe. I mean, my shit-wads story, not "my pc died". lol

I lost a map which is a test map with nice scripting actions to spawn monsters and I forgot to make a backup in my HDD because I wanted to restore my laptop to factory settings :(((

Still hurt on that one....

Oh, yeah, that happened. I was working on a conversion of another game, got weapons, monsters, some levels and textures for them done. Then my HDD suddenly died. So, I have to do it all over again, damn it. Well, I've learned the process of doing it, so this time it goes a bit easier.

Never lost anything because of hardware failure. But I certainly have lost work because my mods got corrupted during saving/node-building.

My own Doom "creations" are largely demos, and no, I've never lost any of them (even by accidentally overwriting). I haven't suffered any data losses for well over 20 years in fact.*

But other people's Doom creations, yes, and it is a painful one. I had downloaded a lot of files from CompuServe's Action Games Forum in the mid-1990s - probably a more or less complete set of the major stuff in the file libraries. I only had partial back-ups of it (hey, back then it involved lots of floppies and was messy as hell, or dodgy hardware like zip disks or slow and crappy tape drives), so when there was a hard-disk failure, I was unable to resurrect some of it. By that point the Forum was no more, and as far as I can tell (and to my surprise), virtually no one had a full back-up. Bob Evans apparently did, and stated an intent to make it available a few years ago, but so far that hasn't happened.

So yeah, that's a shame. Especially as I lovingly backed up the full set of files from the CompuServe Chess Forum's file libraries, and that was mostly junk, with nothing of value that couldn't be found elsewhere.

* OK, there was one close call, but the LOCK and UNDELETE commands in MS-DOS came in handy.

A long time ago, when I was around 10 or 11 years old, I accidentally trashed my projects folder that contained several years' worth of my Doom, Wolf3D, and HyperCard work. There was a lot of screaming and crying that day.

2 minutes ago, esselfortium said:

A long time ago, when I was around 10 or 11 years old, I accidentally trashed my projects folder that contained several years' worth of my Doom, Wolf3D, and HyperCard work. There was a lot of screaming and crying that day.

Oh no!!!

Luckily, you've done so much since then. :D

The biggest doom lost i've experienced was sometime around 2010 - 2011, my O.S. decided to die after a blackout, and back then i didn't knew that i could boot another O.S. to start making backups, so i just went ahead and formated my PC.....

So much stuff was lost, lots of personal stuff, videos that i had edited for a friend's travel to other continent, experimental stuff using SPC music to make some interesting music remakes, and specially doom levels such an early version of a rambo mod prototype that i had made, half a map in doom 3 style, an action doom 2d remake using pogostick as a base, a wad that spawned doom marine soldiers and simulated a war complete with tanks, artillery and even airplanes, heck i even had a variation of that war wad that consisted in a "omaha beach landing" map were infinite spawning soldiers would try to reach the end of the beach under heavy fire, but the heaviest loss of all was a map that i was making on the spot improvising just to practice my skills and create areas outside of what i usually make, i really miss that map. It was a heavy loss for me not just on a doom level but also on a personal one, if only had i knew and had the tools back then...

I lost a bunch of Duke3D maps once if that counts.

In recent times I've been pretty fastidious about never throwing anything away, and keeping backups of literally everything I make as best I can, so anything of mine that is lost to time was old and probably crap anyway.

Once I accidentally deleted all the Doomworld news articles and associated comment threads from the first 6 months of 2001. WHOOPS!

Back in the mid-90's, I had partial work done on several Episode 1 levels. Somehow, they got corrupted and couldn't be salvaged. I didn't have them backed up anywhere, so they were just gone.

I suppose I could have just remade them, but around the same time, DCK went from freeware to crippled shareware (which pissed me of, but that's a different story) and I wasn't as proficient with DEU.

Of course, at the time, graduating high school and going to college to precedence over designing Doom levels, too, so there was that.

I guess I can also add that the floppy disks on which I had my copies of Doom (v. 1.666, at that) and Doom 2 became corrupted, so I couldn't install Doom or Doom 2 from them. I could get about halfway before being informed of the error in the data, which halted the process.

Several times through the years.   Once from a fatal Wadauthor crash, once from a powersurge and once from bad file management.   Now I save all my levels incrementally and it prevents huge losses.  Keeping things on a thumbdrive, my hard drive and on dropbox is my current failsafe.

Just once, and it's the reason I don't use Deepsea anymore.  Evidently if you're editing something in a wad with multiple maps, there's a chance whatever map you're working on will overwrite the first map lump listed in the wad.  Thankfully, I was able to recover an older build of the map that got overwritten, and just touched it up to the way it was before.

And then there's that dumb Dark Arena port I was working on, which I purposefully deleted halfway through.  But that's another story.

Every attempt I've made at making a WAD with more than one level has resulted in some irreversible catastrophe that makes the levels unusable.

28 minutes ago, Novaseer said:

Every attempt I've made at making a WAD with more than one level has resulted in some irreversible catastrophe that makes the levels unusable.

Yikes. That's terrifying.

3 minutes ago, HAK3180 said:

Yikes. That's terrifying.

Hence why I'm only working on a single map right now, without adding any exterior assets.

Cleaning software.

'Nuff said.

I'll never use them anymore now.

I lost my personal collection (not a HUGE collection but a decent collection nonetheless) of assorted sprites, SKIES, PLAYPAL and DECORATE resources and some full blown G/ZDoom mod files as well as personally modified versions of them I've had since 2012 because the crappy USB stick decided to fall out mid-transfer one day and corrupted all the data. The real kicker is I was just handling that stick not even that many days prior to offload some things I wanted for purposing my Doom Plus modification I released a while back on here. I should've moved all my stuff over to the lappy I was using to work on or something just in case 'something went wrong'.

Well, you can never be too paranoid when it comes to computers.

Was quite a routine before I left civilian life.

Now I'm militarian, and... well, it does happen, but, 1-2 times per half-year because I just start to dislike what I have done.

I fear this day could come inevitably... And when it does.... I will die internally....

I've been using Google Sync for my Doom folder and it's amazing for backups. You get 15gb for free and can have it monitor a folder so as soon as you make a change it'll be reflected on your Google Drive. No need to manually back stuff up, highly recommended.

Years ago, like back in college, I made a brick and metal hell map where I detailed every brick in the wall. It was called Brick by Brick. An early version of Doom Builder didn't like the detail level, and one day the node builder killed the data. The backup file was so old that I lost motivation. That was the end of Brick by Brick. It would've been pretty sweet if I had gotten to finish it.