I recently lost my hard drive and with it a number of downloads. Is there any way to re-download expired purchases?

Hate to sound snide, but the only way to do this is to buy them again assuming the downloads are still available.

Lost all my past stuff to a dysfunctional external hard drive. I've moved over to cloud storage, which is worth paying for. And I agree - sorry, but any past purchases will have to be re-purchased, unless the seller is incredibly generous

if any of them were from my stores, i would gladly send you a link if you still have the email confirmations of your purchase.

Only way is to buy them again.

I've lost a few and had the producers nice enough to let me download them again without buying them again. If you can remember the sites, and your purchase info (email, etc) some of the produces might let you redownload them for free.

I think MessMaster would let you do it, assuming the following conditions are true -

1) The videos were purchased via UMD, not through an external site that sold the video on UMD as well.

2) The videos in question are still up for sale, and have not been taken down at all, even if they were re-uploaded later.

3) You have the same account now as when the videos were purchased.

How, this isn't a guarantee, but I think he would. He seems to bend over backwards to help people who have unassed money. I try to also. Yeah, I may lose the price of a video now, but if that makes you mad, and don't shop with me again, did I really save money?

I get this request at least once a month. I can almost always resend you links... especially if you have the original order number. Then it's as simple as reauthorizing it again for a few more days.

If you have made purchases thru Vidown from multiple vendors, it's best to contact me directly and we can do everything under the same email address all at once.

customerservice@themothership.net

Also, a reminder that an external drive is NOT a backup if you don't also still have the material on your main computer. You need a minimum of two copies of everything you're interested in keeping. 3 copies if it's actually important. All hard drives fail. Some don't even work out of the box. Some die after a few weeks or months. A few might last 10 years. It's pretty much a crap-shoot.

Make two copies!

What @soundguy said. Data is precious, storage is cheap, so have multiple copies.

How I do it (and I'd recommend this to anyone with any kind of WAM collection):

1. Primary storage is my PC's internal hard drives. Instant access, no buffering.

2. Connected to the PC is an external hard drive with a complete copy of my WAM folders (both my own productions and bought from sites and stores). That gets updated weekly at least. This is a local backup against the internal HDD failing.

3. I have a subscription to BackBlaze, $5 a month and they back up your entire system, no need to select folders or any of that mlarkey. This is a backup against a fire at the Hall (gods forbid but there have been some devastating fires in old houses).

4. I have a second external hard drive that lives, powered down, in my storage unit on the edge of the nearest major city. This gets swapped with the disk in item 2 every now and then (so both have full copies of everything). This is a backup against getting hit by ransom-ware.

Total cost is 2 x external hard disks ($100 each for 4TB) and $5 a month to BackBlaze. Even just considering what I've spent buying scenes from other producers, it's worth it, not to mention the thousands of pounds invested in our own unreleased material.

BackBlaze is at http://www.backblaze.com - and their blog is well worth reading if you're interested in the reliability of different brands of hard disks.