Wednesday, August 12, 2020

#RPGaDay2020: Day 12 - Message

I'm usually ahead of myself when it comes to #RPGaDay posts, but today was going to cut it pretty close. 

"Message" is today's prompt, and all I was hoping for was a message on my voice mail:

"Hey ViscountEric, it's Bob from Top o' the Mountain computers. We've completed the data recovery on the hard drive you dropped off and you can come pick it up..."

Well into the pandemic, after the initial doom and gloom and depression that we'd never see another human being we didn't live with, I made my first attempt to declutter.  We had dozens of bags of clothes, toys, and household items reading for the Salvo, but one item was put aside, an old hard drive from a twenty year old computer. 

The desktop, running on Windows Millennium Edition, and a 30 gig hard drive, had served me well through the early 2000's  (the last days of dial-up).  It was my repository for two things dear to my heart: all my ttrpg info, specifically more and more detail about my homebrewed World of Georic, and over twenty seasons of data of my solitaire Dice Baseball leagues. 

In its final days of use, more than a decade ago,  it was relegated to an out of the way mudroom, and with the birth of my first daughter, the tower went up on a shelf in the garage and was forgotten about. 

Once restrictions were lifted on "non-essential" business, I dropped the hard drive off at the local computer place with a flash drive and simple instructions: Recover everything in My Documents, but if there were problems, attempt to pull at least the Hackmaster GM Toolkit, which had all my Georic notes, all the Hackmaster specific notes, and a character creation program that probably doesn't work on Windows 10.
I'll say this about our local repair place, communication has been pretty good and he's put in more hours than he's charging.  The hard drive is failing after a few minutes, so I'm grateful I didn't bug some friends for the cables and tried the transfer myself.  When he finally gets the last few files off, I'll be delighted to pay the man his going rate and see what files are actually salvageable, clean them up in a modern format and save the files in two spots.  

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