Data Recovery
~ 2 Minute Read.
I spent the last three days recovering old projects.
There is this one 2TB external hard drive I had for ages, broken for six years — yet I never threw it away or tried to format it to maybe be able use it again. That’s because I knew it contained memories. Not images or videos from when I was a kid, but much more important: it was the only place where I had stored my first programming, game programming and blender projects.
- Pyromania
- Notenspiel
- Zombiehunt
- QuadEngine/Mineshooter
- Blender LEGO Projects
- The Nature Academy Projects
- Boorland C++ Builder Applications
- my early console applications, everything! 1
I even found projects I totally forgot about:
- “Baller”, a 2D top down shooter attempt
- “BlueMoon”, a spaceship game attempt inspired by Galaga,
- “Loop”, a midi sampler application which was supposed to allow you to overlay repeating predefined loops,
- “Labyrinth”, an action RPG attempt based on a project from the games programming book 2 I learnt with originally.
After failing with the first recovery with Piriform’s Recuva, EaseUS was able to show me the most important files in its trial version. The moment when I unfolded the “Eclipsec++” directory and found QuadEngine was elecrifying and nearly brought me to tears. If you put enough heart and time into a project it’s like seeing an old friend again after a long time. 3
A long self debate later on whether to purchase the full version for 80€ (which is a lot currently), I got the license and now have access to the source code of all these projects again.
I will be gradually open sourcing them, starting with the bigger ones, Pyromania and Zombiehunt, for archiving purposes and to give people a chance to play around with them.
Written in 30 minutes, edited in 10 minutes.