Terrible news. All my mods are on hiatus until I can rescue them from my dead HDD, which after trying several home solutions is going to cost me upwards of $780 CDN for a professional disk rescue—this is the best quote I got after being assured all my files are safe in there, I just can’t access them because the firmware is corrupted. Why didn’t I have a backup? Well, I had an automatic backup folder on an external drive that ended up being empty, because I didn’t think to check up on it regularly. I also have a backup from 2016, but I did a ton of work on my mods since then. I even have scattered WIPs backed up on Dropbox, but it’s a total mess, and trying to pick up what scattered pieces I have left makes me so gut-sick I can’t even bear to look. I also have a partial recovery, including the last esp of UL 4.0, but almost everything else I pulled from my dying drive was corrupted.
Most of what’s missing is a ton of assets (and I went crazy making meshes right up until the crash) I’ve made for Uvirith’s Legacy, The Tea Mod, a bunch of mesh replacers such as MIO, complete replacers for Orcish and glass weapons and armor, and the stuff I made post-2016 for Uvirith Overgrowth, which was supposed to replace Building up Uvirith’s Legacy and ended up becoming a brand new, even grander town expansion than you can imagine. Which is why I take screenshots of my WIPs.
If you’d like to know what’s hanging in the balance, I have WIP album of Uvirith’s Legacy 4.0 and Uvirith Overgrowth, as well as more info about everything here.
I can’t afford to pay almost $800 to recover my disk, currently living below the poverty line. I’ve never been comfortable asking for donations for modding, but what I’ve lost is mostly original assets: nif and dds files, as well as my master blends and psds. I’ve reached $180 CND so far, thanks to a couple extremely generous donors. I don’t know how long it will take, but if people are willing to donate enough to save all the untold hours I’ve put into these mods, I’ll work as many more hours as it takes to bring these mods back to life.
This PayPal button links directly to my sarahdimento email address. If you decide to donate, thank you. It means a lot to me.
Until then, I did release a handful of small mods in the summer, which you can find linked on my downloads page, so it’s not a totally barren Christmas after all.
Update 01/04/2018: After getting 1/3 of the way there over the holidays, and incredibly generous donor has given $500! I can now afford to rescue my files. Thank you! I’m completely amazed. I’ll turn in my drive for rescue early next week. In the meantime, I’ve started organizing my changelog, since I’ve always had a text file of that up on Dropbox, so I’ll have an easier time figuring out where to start when I can work on the mod again.
Update 01/08/2018: Here is the new changelog, as promised. As you can see, there are several huge sub-projects left to be done, but the mod was at least 80% complete when I last left it. The biggest job is file reorganization (once I get all my files back), which may itself take a few months, but work on the mod itself ought to be well underway by the summer.
Update 01/25/2018: My files are back! Thanks again to everyone who donated to make this happen. It’s going to take me a few months to organize the mess and figure out where I left off, but once that’s done I can get back to modding!
