The situation
For two years, we've worked with a system of two drives: one with the original files and a mirror with a full back-up copy of the first. This was done to ensure if we lost one of them, the other could take over with a minimum of workload and no loss of data.
At least, that was the set-up... and the way it was supposed to work. It seemed safe and worked like a charm for two years. The only thing we didn't think about... "What will happen when both disks fail at the same time?" We just never thought about that possibility.
And then, last Friday, Murphy struck. Both drives gave out at the same time... In one evil strike of faith, we lost all of our digital photographs, our entire play list, the complete runtime, the coding for four sites, every chapter of my books and everything WoM related.
For two days, my brother and I have been trying to restore as much as we could. Local files, email, PM, old CD/DVD back-ups and old download-folders (local ones. Our download back-up is gone too) filled in some of the blanks.
The bad news
The WoM files that I've been able to find are the originally-send files by the artists. Often only sketches. Everything I've done myself in three years of Maxic is gone... This means all certs, marking templates, but also a lot of inking, shading and even a few of our lines.
The only complete file I still have, is the female Visitor, which I had wrongly saved to my local files instead of the drive. I finished shading her only recently and still needed to move her.
Amount of known lost line arts:
silverfoxkit (44 line arts)
Skysong Keitra (16 line arts)
Gemaah-Maii (amount unsure)
Willow (4 + mutations)
Sif (3)
.:|Cutiepie|:. (3)
yruvian (10)
These are only the ones I remember without any of my files... I know there are more, mostly unreleased breeds.
I will contact the artists for which i know I have missing lines, though I don't expect anything really. I can only hope they still have the originals, but I know it's a long shot. Several of these lines are more than a year old after all.
If you've made a line art for me in the past and want to know whether it survived, you can always contact me here or on PI.
First priority: new certs. The lines with templates, no matter how old, can start up again as soon as I get a cert in place.
Second: find an inker for those lines that only have sketches. Even though I inked them myself before, I'd rather commission someone for this part this time around.
Third: template and shade inked lines.
Status report: new certs have been created. The lines for Willow and Cif have been recovered. Skysong Keitra has offered to redraw the horse Faeval (with new mutations as a commission).
Calomel has been a great help in re-inking the Totem Animal Wolves.
I've contacted several artists... most of the Lore Guides and Totem animals are saved or recovered. Faeval is looking good, thanks to the line artists.
I think the Faering will be retired, unless a lot of people want them to come back. Otherwise, there will at one time be owl Totem Animals and birdkin Visitors.
The main problem so far will be for lines exclusive to PI. I lost all of the old Aerean Faerie arts, the original Western and Eastern Dragons and all Descendents of the Power Planes.