Disaster Strikes in the Black Meadow
 

I put in 3 months on my Black Meadow Rising Server.

Had the first area (Odus) pretty much done.
Had the 2nd and 3rd areas about 50% complete.
Added 50+ custom quests.
Added 500+ new mobs (including pets for every class... wimpy ones but...)
Added 100+ new items.

Was having the time of my life working on this. Had more fun with it than I ever had actually playing the game.

Then, my neighbors 16 year old son and some of his pals decided they needed a new computer and stereo equipment yesterday while I was at work. Broke into my house and took it all. EQ Server machine, laptop, backup comp, and stereo... and actually stomped on my Elvis Moody Blue Album.

My neighbor, caught the boys with the stuff in his garage late last night. He came over and got me and we assessed the damage.

EQ Server machine was re-formatted with Debiun Linux installed. Bye bye all my work. My backup machine isnt working at all. Guess they dropped it or something. It wont power up. Might be fixable. The laptop had no damage because I had let it run out of charge and the dimwit thieves didn't steal the power cord.

So... guess I'm down for awhile.

Fucking Hate Thieves! Chop off their dominant hand and brand a T in their foreheads so everyone will know they are thieves.. thats my solution anyway.. good luck on the recovery

You should press charges and sue them for your lost efforts/labor.

Not much I can do except press charges. The kids dad is a good guy and I hate to do that. Ad he is the one that caught his son and friends and turned them in.

I got all my hardware back except the hard drive from my backup comp, it was a 1.2 tb drive. So, no back ups. I lost a lot more stuff that just EQemu server on that drive.

I learned a valuable lesson... back up off site. I will backup to one of my machines at work as a 2nd backup from now on.

On the bright side, I got winxp re-installed and updated and just now went thru the set of EQEMU again so Black Meadow Rising is starting again.

Oh... and one more thing. The kids dad found an Elvis Moody Album on Ebay and ordered it for me.

As for someone who has lost all his hard work before I feel your pain. It sucks and its far worse than that feeling of playing a game for 5 hours, forgetting to save and then the power flickers and you just rage quit. Pick it back up and after all you've learned you'll also have new perspectives to go about introducing new content. Horrible thing that happened, but on a brighter note at least your neighbor is going through lengths to attempt to remedy the situation to the best of his ability. I wish you the best of luck with the reconstruction of your new server.

That's pretty shitty, hope it doesn't discourage you. It's always nice to see servers with fresh ideas popping up.

It does beg the question however... what kind of hooligan nerd breaks into a house, steals a computer, and then installs Linux on it?

That sucks JimB, I've learned the hard way too about not using off site backups.

One suggestion is to dropbox all of your custom work. the free 2gb should hold the emu + quests + db backups with plenty to spare for custom stuff. the maps are too big for the free dropbox account.

just my $0.02

Ask the dad to have his son rake, cut, and weed your yard for the summer. That should free up a little bit of time to put back into the server.

I think it will help you to reinvision the server and with the experienced you gained from working on it the past few months, you'll have it back up in half the time. It will make for a better overall server in the long run.

Sorry to hear about this, I sympathize with you!