James Rosendahl,

Hi James,

I downloaded and reinstalled the game just now (10pm UK time) and it registered okay. It may be that your security is blocking the outward bound signal; though I don't know whether this would prompt a ''giveaway is over dialog box''?

sailorbear510 aka Jason,

Sorry to hear of your external drive woes. I hope you sort things out successfully.

I've lost a few over the years, so now do double backups of my most important files. All my family photos are backed up three times (I never reuse the micro SSD's, instead I buy a new one once the once being used is approaching maximum capacity, so as to have an extra back up of the photo's). I lost a whole bunch of holiday snaps several years ago after my daughter dropped the hard drive (it was an old mechanical one). I still have that drive with the intention of eventually sending it to one of those experts who specialize in recovery.

My daughter did Camps International in between leaving sixth form and going to university back in the summer of 2018. She went to Ecuador and did various jobs to help local communities; for example, rebuilding a small village school and repairing a road (patching potholes). While there she had lots of amazing adventures. I gave her loads of spare batteries for her camera and one of those large recharger batteries so that she wouldn't run out of power as some of the places she stayed didn't have the facility to recharge the batteries,. The SSD she used to take videos included such things as swimming with dolphins and lots of footage when she visited the Galapagos Islands. When she returned, on taking it out of the camera, it cracked and was inaccessible, so I sent it to an expert, but he was unable to recover any of the videos. He said SSD's are much harder to recover data from. So we lost everything.

Whiterabbit-uk, Thank you for the sentiments. When I moved from Sacramento to Hayward in California in 2016 I would take train trips to see my Grandma in which would be the last 2 years of her life. I promised her that I would visit her as much as I can and have many photos of her and I visiting together in her care home in Sacramento. Thankfully the backup was successful and later in the afternoon I am going to reformat my laptop to start out fresh and install Steam again as my library had already been moved.

sailorbear510 aka Jason,
For backups, may I recommend Carbonite? They support 'unlimited' data on a drive, can cover external drives and is reasonably priced if you buy the 3-year plan(s). I have been using them for quite a while now and have recovered all of my files more than once (2x crash HDD, 1x new PC). The one drawback I've seen is they don't automatically select "ALL" files in a folder. There are some they don't select by default. But if you select them manually it does back them up.
No, I don't work for them. Just love their service. It's encrypted before it leaves your computer. Files can be recovered individually or by folder

sailorbear510 aka Jason,

Sorry to hear of your grandma's passing. Those images will be precious.

My grandma, whom I lived with frequently over my childhood and teens due to my father working away and my mother in and out of hospital for most of my childhood and youth; so I was 'palmed off' to my fathers parents. Which for me was the best and I attribute my success educationally and in life to their care and foresight in introducing me to many things. My grandma passed the same day as John Lennon on the 8th Dec 1980. It took me a long time to get over her passing. But my memories as well as photo's and cine film ( I have several thousand feet of cine film, and I've been editing out anything that isn't family oriented with a view to having it transferred to digital). Those cine films contain many memories from the early 60's till my grandfathers passing in 1992 and are extremely precious; which is why I'm having them transferred digitally using the frame by frame method so that I can pass copies on to my cousins and aunts.

PAFlyer,

Thanks for the heads up on Carbonite; I'll check that out. :)

In case it helps anyone...

For long term storage CDs & DVDs can be an excellent choice, with an expected longevity of 30-100 years. While I haven't been able to find what I consider a reliable source regarding Blu-ray writable discs, user forums indicate dismal longevity often measured in months. My experience is that writable Blu-ray discs are physically more vulnerable than CDs & DVDs, using a film rather than a hard plastic layer for protection. Retail Blu-ray discs [non-writable] are IMHO physically identical to DVDs, but are Very vulnerable to scratches, and a very tiny, near invisible scratch can make the disc unreadable. You can also research M-Disc & archival grade DVDs & Blu-ray writable discs. It doesn't seem like there's a huge market for this sort of expensive media, and you can read reports of manufacturers not actually providing what you paid for [you gonna be around in 100 years to see they cheated you & lied?].

sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00009195

loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd-r_dvd-r_rw_longevity.html

Archiving files to the cloud is a good option, providing the cloud service provider is a company like Microsoft, Amazon, or Google that's almost certain to be around for decades. Cloud storage uses redundant hard disks / SSDs that are monitored & replaced as needed within a fortress-like data center with all sorts of protections, but nonetheless s*** happens and clients have [very rarely] lost data. So it's best to have another copy somewhere, including possibly another cloud service, just to be safe if the data is irreplaceable. One disadvantage is that depending on how you connect to the internet, uploads can be terribly, terribly slow, e.g., cable broadband. Another disadvantage is while you can easily pass a collection of DVDs to the next generation, cloud storage is dependent on someone continuing to maintain the account & if necessary, continuing to pay the bills. Windows is set to natively use OneDrive, so it's the easiest, & though it's a slight bit of work, you can set any folder to be automatically mirrored to your OneDrive account.

winbuzzer.com/2020/07/24/how-to-onedrive-folder-sync-any-directory-via-mklink-xcxwbt/

External drives are cool, but all drives will eventually fail, even if they've just been sitting in a drawer, so you need redundancy. Drives have been getting cheaper for years, but part of the reason why is that manufacturers are cutting corners, so you will not see the same reliability as even 5 years ago. One problem that you can easily check for is an external drive's temperature while in use with something like Crystal Disk Info. It might take some time searching but you can usually find out the drive manufacturer's specs on how hot a particular drive can get before it starts throttling or having problems, including shortening its lifespan. I assume because it adds cost & size to the drive enclosure, external drives normally lack active cooling, which may be all right for 2.5" [laptop] drives & most SSDs, but not full sized conventional hard disks. You can buy enclosures for one or more drives that do include fans, or use a drive dock & a separate small desk fan. One advantage of buying a drive & enclosure separately is that if the USB circuitry goes bad [which it unfortunately does too often], the drive & its data are still good. Note: there are a Lot of companies selling external housings for NVMe drives, but beware the potential gotchas... the chipsets & their firmware are not all equal, so research before you buy. Also research the temperature characteristics of the drive you plan to use -- some run Very hot. Many of these housings use a sliding cover design with a thermal pad so the case acts as a heatsink, BUT, to make the slide part work the pad does not contact the drive so there's no heatsink or any other cooling in place. It's also a good idea to disconnect external drives when not in use, because ransomware.

Windows itself will let you store data on 2 or more internal or external mirrored drives, so if one drive fails, your data's still safe.

support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/storage-spaces-in-windows-b6c8b540-b8d8-fb8a-e7ab-4a75ba11f9f2#WindowsVersion=Windows_11

Windows File History can also come in handy, automatically syncing your choice of folders with an external drive or USB stick at intervals you set, or simply every time you insert the USB stick.

zdnet.com/home-and-office/work-life/how-to-back-up-your-files-in-windows-10-and-11-with-file-history/

pcworld.com/article/833338/windows-file-history-review.html

mike, excellent info. Let me clarify 1 thing for the folks, to reinforce what you said about blu-rays being so vulnerable to empasize the warning your giving, but talking about the "why" this is true. As you know, mike, Blu-Rays are so fragile because of the nature of way the format works. The laser in a standard CD/DVD burner/player is red. The size (technically because of the size - wavelength - of the light) is larger than a blu-ray's laser. Blue light is smaller/thinner (because it has a smaller wavelength) than red, so, if all other things are equal, the beam is smaller, which is a way to burn more detail on the disc. That's the reason, as again you know mike, that the blu-ray disc can have superior quality (quality takes up space, folks) and more stuff on it than a DVD can. The problem is, the things that hurt discs - scratches, scuff, finger oil smudges, jelly or similar foreign substances, can do much more to impede the reading of a blu-ray than of a DVD, and of a CD, which has the least info. and the widest burned bands of data. All 3 of these formats have ways to recreate a certain amount of missing data based on what's still readable, but, the smaller the data band that's burned on to the disc, the more data is lost by the same size scratch, smudge, etc. on the blu-ray as compared to the other discs. So, to finish with the obvious statement, blu-rays ARE much more fragile as an unfortunate side effect of the design which gives you noticeably better value than a DVD. As the late Gilda Radner, playing her hilariously ultra-annoying TV journalist character, Roseanne Roseanna Danna used to say, "It's always something!"

The one slight silver lining is that blu-ray players are great for playing DVDs and CD, since that smaller beam is so much more forgiving reading those bigger information bands and recreating all the data. You could almost take sandpaper to a CD and still play it on a blu-ray player. I've played DVDs with little problem on a blu-ray that were practically full of scratches.

Oh, well. It's always something! :P

Oops, should also suggest, as per what mike inferred, that that is why you should consider burning data on a DVD, - even though it will hold less - vice a blu-ray, as it may last longer because you can always try to read it with a blu-ray, vice a DVD drive, if it was giving you problems on the DVD drive.

Unfortunately, the big problem with all of these is the laser systems last a lot less long than any kind of disc does. I've seen burners/players go on for years, but have also seen them sort of burn-out - in that they just stop reading anything, in 5 years or slightly less. Laser drives are not considering long lasting devices. So, stockpile some old ones, either for your computer, TV, or sound system, just in case.