[Balanor]

The vacation went well, thanks for asking. Expensive, but well. I might have to readjust prices for the resort on the northern Alaor island as I forgot just how expensive stuff is when you're eating and drinking on an island (kidding).

Bert, I'll call that data recovery place today and see what they have to say. It will take days to get the drive back and then days to get it to them if that is the route that's attempted.

NOITCA, no scripting, area loss, or travel setup will be lost. In fact more is going to be added with the large addition of the city of Surthay now available in the most recent module. The databases and characters are what is lost.

I've already got a plan to backup the server vault and databases to a OneDrive folder on the new drive (which gets synced to the cloud), as well as to an external drive or USB that will always be connected to the server. The new hard drive is an SSD, which may help eliminate some lag issues but could wear down faster. Depending on how things turn out, I may purchase a second HDD just to have in case the first should fail unexpectedly after a short-ish amount of time again.

I'll discuss with the DMs some ideas for moving forward and will look at comments here for your ideas and what could work moving forward. If it comes to a full/partial 'reboot' again (I did want the first one, I don't want this one), I completely and totally get that everyone wants to have their character back to where it was. But we need to balance just how much we (everyone) are expecting of the DMs (and what they're willing to take on) since we're looking at dozens and dozens of players that would need this done, and so it is done in a way that is fair to most, or all, players.