Day: December 3, 2023

So.  After dodging Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday disaster last month (mostly) we had a random power outage a couple of days ago and it’s becoming apparent this destroyed a bunch of computer equipment; 1 totally dead machine that wont even power up, 2 f’ed external hard drives and a couple of annoying issues on my main machine that I haven’t been able to fully identify yet.

99% of my equipment stays on 24/7 and despite the risks I’ve never used an uninterruptable power supply.  Bad fucking idea, dude.

Here’s the thing, aside from the unbootable computer, which stings like hell, the main external 4TB drive that I’ve been rendering all these animations to has died.  As usual, of course, all the 3ds Max source files get backed up nightly, but the rendered image sequences do not.  And while I could go back and attempt to rerender a Max file from say a year ago, there’s no guarantee that I didn’t make changes to the file after I rendered it, in fact it’s likely.

What this means then is most of the animations here are now entirely unique.  In a world defined by infinitely and exacting digital reproducibility these same ani’s are now unreproducible.

Sort of in shock and wrapping my ahead around the best way forward, kind of at a loss for what to do next.  The level of aggravation that’s waiting is making me just want to avoid it all.

12:30p update

• dead machine resurrected (stripped down, blown out, re-seated, replugged, reset, reconfigured, helliphino)
• 2 lost hd’s
• 1 flakey but otherwise still awesome functioning main machine
• researching UPS