Good evening fellow mappers, I am here to tell you of the horrendous mistake I made with UOCOD.

I used this.........Compiling Method on a NTFS Formatted Drive, when I compiled my map for finalization.
It didn't seem like it did anything different than when I compiled the way most do, the fast vis...etc.

SOOOOOOOOOO...I went in to my map, had to find the 0 node problem, yadayada....

Compiled with just BAT file and things looked good.

Went to see my grandson in hospital (he's okay, home now, had a weird reaction to something).

So I sit down at the old (actually it's brand new, that's a Dell story I should tell ya about.... ) computer and I see the folder I made for compiling the NTFS way and since I'm not going to need that anymore, I delete it.

DON'T DO THIS...IT ALSO ERASED MY ENTIRE COD FOLDER I USE FOR MAPPING.

All my maps are gone, not a one left because I didn't think that I was deleting my COD folder when I emptied my recycle bin a few minutes later.

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Lesson learned =

SORRY FOR CAPS BUT SOME NEOPHYTE (other than me) IS GOING TO DO THE SAME THING.

SO DO NOT SAVE ALL YOUR COPIES IN YOUR COD FOLDER, MAKE A SEPARATE FOLDER ON YOUR DESKTOP AND CALL IT BACKUPS.

Opps, sorry to hear that mate.

I use the ntfs way, it works well IMHO, but I never feel the need to delete anything... must do a clean up and backup one of these days...

But don't despair, if you run Nortons you might be able to recover a lot of it?

Grassy

Sorry, but I suppose if you can keep another person from making the same mistake it makes up for it a bit. I really should back up my stuff now.

Get a flash drive for like $25 and periodically save your stuff to it. You can work anywhere with it and always have that backup copy on your flash drive.

I use my Ipod Shuffle to carry stuff such as pictures, documents, programs, and stuff like that.

THere are programs out there which can recover data which you have deleted, google for it. If you delete something, it doesn't get erased, it's just taken out of the file structure and that part of the harddrive is "free" to write on. So.. if you haven't saved too much since deleting the folder, you might be able to save some stuff from that folder.

Man I'm not gonna lie, I had to at least crack a smile after reading that. I'm kind of neurotic that way, I have to check a file like ten times before I delete it, and another ten before i empty the recycling bin. It's not always a bad thing (hint hint ) it's okay though, maybe it means you can start all fresh and wonderful again. I've got backups on two harddrives, a flash drive, plus i burn cds of stuff from time to time so i can actually get rid of old files. some call me crazy, but i've been in your position before, and done the very same thing, so i still go through the motions. It's just too much to lose, you know?

Anyway, I feel your pain.

good luck!

Update from he**...lol just kidding

I did save a lot of my prefabs and I had taken many SS, so I am about half way through a rebuild.

I did look to recover the lost data but I was having a couple problems on final compile, so, what the hey...a new beginning.

New map is similar yet I like it better.

This mapping stuff is addictive for one like me with too much time on my hands.

"What was that wife?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm going to get to the kitchen remodel later today, c'mon woman, you said you feel my pain !"

I do have to once again extend a great big thanks to a lot of you guys at Modsonline, invaluable knowledge and pretty decent folk, also.

"Woman, get away...okay, okay, I'm going...grab the compouind bucket will ya?"

External USB/firewire drives also work well for backups. Along with programs like Acronis TrueImage, Second Copy 2000, rsync or even simply XCOPY.

I burn a copy of my CoD program folder to DVD about once every 2 weeks (my folder fits on a single DVD still).

I even considered using a source code control system. Instead, I simply rename my map twice a day to a new suffix number. (Which has saved my bacon twice already as I was able to repair a corrupted layer by pulling it from the previous version.)