Big Data accident - Backup lost completely

Hey - long time not heard

Lot’s of work to do here and the summer also started yet. I’ve not been with flight sim or VATSIM during the last weeks. Just started reading some forums and news sites again these days. I was happy to see the Digital Aviation Fokker 70/100 was released some time ago. It was highly anticipated by the whole flight sim community.

Due to some technical reasons i had formatted the windows pc here where fs2004 and fsx (with vista) were running. I only reinstalled Windows XP as i don’t need vista at all and my pc is still to small for really good fsx performance. I just had it installed by the end of last week - it’s a rather fresh one.

I moved all my flight sim data from the local file server to a single hard disk last week using a sata/usb adapter. As the DA Fokker 100 was one of the airplanes i was hardly waiting for i decided to reinstall FS2004 at the weekend and i also wanted to attach the hard disk with all the addons and tools on it. So i attached it again via the adapter.

Then it happened - sparks cam from the bottom of the disk and it smelled like burned data. The Hard disk was completely broken - the electronics burned somehow (i still don’t know why) and all my flight sim data (about 40 Gigs) were lost. Too bad but i started trying to get everything back directly after that crash. As i’ve bought most of my addons online i tried to redownload them. Unfortunately this wasn’t possible on most of the Shops. Some of them have a time limit on downloads whereafter they expire. You have to pay again to get them back. I don’t understand why they do this as the customers already paid for the product - i didn’t see this anywhere else then in some flightsim shops yet.

I didn’t want to pay for the whole stuff. Silly, you have to pay around $4 for every single product ( i bought about 50 products around the web so this should be arround 200$). So i started emailing them and told them what happened. To my surprise neary everyone understood my situation and 2 days later i had most of the addons back on my disk. The only products i had to pay for were from PMDG - like expected.

After all FS2004 is up and running with most of the important addons. I still have to do some performance tuning and the graphics are still not really nice - some work left to do. I hope to get into the fokker by the end of the week. Wetter is much to nice here to spend the evenings in front of the flight sim.