Notice: Our donation goals have been met! Thank you everyone who helped out, you’re life’swork-savers! More info here!
I need help. I lost all of the files on my computer – it’s dying, and I was expecting that, so I had backed them up. Then my external hard-drive died. According to the place I brought it to, one of the drive heads is broken, and it managed to damage the disk too.
It will cost $1299 to get the files off of it, and I don’t have the money.
The half completed Elvish Name Database is on it. A year’s worth of work, and one of the most often requested new features.
The Recorded Non-English lines project is on it.
The Building Thalassian project is on it.
The partially complete Sindarin translation of The Lady of Shalott is on it.
Please, I don’t want to lose all of this work. So much of my life, labor, and linguistic work is trapped, and the possibility of losing it feels like I’m facing losing my memory. Please help me.
After this, I’ll be using triple redundancy – backing things up in a Cloud as well as an external harddrive, so hopefully I don’t ever have to face this again.
I estimate that if donations can cover about 2/3rds of it, ($850) then my spouse and I can cover the rest and still be able to pay rent and eat this month.
The company that’s doing the restoration, ADR, has been great to work with so far. They didn’t charge me a diagnosis fee and they won’t charge me if they can’t recover the files. On the other side, they’ll hold the restored files until I’ve paid the full amount.
If they can’t recover the files and don’t charge me, I’ll send you back your donations. Once the goal of $850 is met, I’ll post again and edit this post so that everyone knows.
As a thank you to anyone who donates and helps save these future parts of the website, I’ll send a personal letter and a photograph of a pretty sunset, because I like pretty sunsets. (if there is a mailing address included)
If you would like to help out, here is the website’s donation page that works through PayPal.
Thank you and Márienna!