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

[Deleted_Account]

A few years ago I had taken an interest in mapping using Linguica's mapping tutorials. I had gotten the hang of using Doombuilder 2 creating maps I had on my mind, and using Slade to add new textures/music/monsters etc. I never actually released anything because I don't think they were good enough, eventually I lost interest and tossed countless hours of work into the recycle bin and deleted them.

[Chronohunter45]

Not sure exactly how long ago it was, but during the development of UDM3, I had 3 maps to contribute that were roughly 90% done.

 

They were also saved to one of those infamous 500GB Seagate Sata 7200.11 drives...

 

I lost more than just those maps - I lost photos of family, high school, music I had made, you name it.

 

I learned the value of regular back ups that day - as well as how powerful RIPlinux and ddrescue are. I salvaged some data, but not all.

 

Still have the drive in hopes that one day I can recover it.

[Szymanski]

I remade some Q2 maps for zdoom (disinformation by Bal and some ztn works) back when zdoom only had sloped walls, lost those with all my emails in a hard drive fail.

[DoomGater]

No. Never. Backups are my fetish. I have about 9 or 10 HDDs lying around here and 2 Hardware RAID
Systems with remote access. NO Cloud. :-)

 

 

 

 

[Soundblock]

In 1996 or '97 I had gotten a second harddisk to complement my existing one. Despite being a bit of clutz with wiring I decided to plug it in myself. Had to disconnected the existing one first to do so. Ended up plugging in the wrong lead to the old harddisk and fried it due to something like x10 voltage in the visually identical wire. Thus ended my ambition of every building my own PCs. One has to know one's limitations.

 

Pretty sure I lost some really early WIP Doom wads, along with my first Quake engine attempts ("Bunker" - it was frustrated and horrid). The one that hurt though, was "Starscraper", a half-finished Doom map I never managed to recreate despite trying. Had a minute-long (roofed) elevator ride with monster spawning in regularily to the lift along the ascent, and a skyvoid w/ walkway top floor with a couple of Cyberdemons pelting you from atop a really friggin tall tower. The Cybos were actually so far away that they couldn't accurately hit the player - the rockets passed overhead if you stood still. Weird bug, but I kinda liked it. Like warning shots to stay the f*ck away. Was a bit stuck at the time on how to continue the map after the tower lobby but I guess i would have come up with something.

 

 

[Man of Doom]

Several years ago, I was working on a Doom Bible project of my own. In fact, all it was really missing was the six episodes full of maps. It had custom monsters, weapons, even custom textscreens. Hell, I even had ideas for how to work on the maps using pencil sketches.

By all accounts, I could've shipped it out as a gameplay mod and call it a day.
But during the time, I was using a version of Windows OneDrive (I think, but I know that it's a Windows backup service which is now defunct), which for the backups themselves, divided up files into segments.

A few years go by, I find the segments of this project, and I try to find a way to get them back together properly. Unfortunately, this backup service was defunct by the time I went back to try to recover this WAD, and I try other methods to bring it back, but to no avail. All my work on that Doom Bible project had been corrupted.

In fact, I think I was still using SLumpED around that time as opposed to SLADE.