Hi.

My hard drive is dead. Absolutely dead. I lost ALL my wam material!!

I wonder if the producers I bought from would send the videos I bought to them... In some pages I can see which ones I have bought...

Any other person with this same problem, would try this?

So far I asked Jayce, not answer yet...

Now, I be doubling all my material, not need to say...

Thanks!

For stuff you bought on UMD it might be worth contacting MessMaster, he runs the store and can see what you have bought over the years I'm sure.

I think most producers would probably help, so long as proof of purchase can be achieved.

This happens about ever six months or so, someone contacts us, or posts here, about losing all their WAM media because of hard drive failures.

Seriously guys, back up your stuff.

Sure they have the info!

I ask now to Nadia... Let's see...

I'm backing up from now... Thanks!

Thanks!!

Here you are the list:

Moho, I just responded back to your email.

And for folks in general... Yes, of course you need to back things up, blah blah. BUT... Thanks to Patrick's Vidown system, it isn't especially hard for me to cover you when you've lost clips. A recent customer of mine had saved all his emails with the codes, and on my end, it was a fairly simple process to simply "renew" them all so he could download everything he lost.

If you don't have ANY records, it's a bit trickier, but I've been known to look up customer info manually and track all those purchases over the years to send them clips once again. I'd say I get a request like this about once a month. SlapstickStuff Customer Service!!

^^^ Dude, there's no need to get all shitty over his specific tastes. We ALL have weird niches here.... Moho is specific about what he likes, and he's willing to pay producers to get exactly what he wants.

For me, "pie spitting" is very specialized, and I wouldn't really shoot that unless I'm doing a scene that's specifically for Moho. But preferring real pies is fairly common... I know Noise has been vocal over his refusal to use shaving cream. Neil only used whipped cream (with food coloring) during his early vids.... Lenny only used buttercream pies forever... And Nadia uses bakery pies now.

I've always used SC (in addition to real pies) since it's less temperamental, and cheaper, and easy to get nice coverage. But the increased quality of HD has skewed me more towards real pies lately, and the models really prefer that. I'd say about half of my recent scenes have nothing but real pies for the first 5-10 minutes, so it's not too hard for someone who prefers that to buy the clip and simply stop watching when the SC pies start.

Seriously, in this day and age, there's just no excuse to not have a backup medium available to store extra copies of all your stuff. They sell 128 gig thumb drives next to the M&Ms and tabloid rags at most retailers' checkout lanes.

This issue doesn't just apply to videos. We increasingly live in a "paperless" era where receipts and invoices are delivered in digital form via email attachments. If you want to win a dispute with a retailer or service provider, you MUST have that documentation. If you itemize deductions, you also need to keep that info for 7 years in case you get audited. Personally, I'm kind of a digital hoarder and have every (non-spam) email I have ever received, going all the way back to the pre-internet days of dialup BBS messaging systems. Even though I archive about 1000 notification emails a day from the Vidown retail system, that entire quarter century of data would still fit easily on a $20 thumb drive.

We ask for a valid email address with every Vidown purchase for a reason. It helps us facilitate things like reauthorizing previous transactions. Because of situations like this, it's in your best interest to use and maintain the same address all the time. For individual clips, you can just contact the vendor, but if you are a long-time prolific buyer, it's a whole lot easier to just contact me directly and provide the email address you used. I can then reauthorize everything under that address at once. We can be contacted for this and any other system issues at customerservice@themothership.net

This is not a perfect solution, however, mainly because vendors come and go in this market on a regular basis. There are several threads on the front page right now dedicated to "retired" producers. Vidown licenses each vendor's work for distribution, but we only have access to it while they have an active account. When someone closes a store, all of their media is deleted from our servers. We can reauthorize past sales, but if the vendor no longer has that store here, or if they no longer have a particular clip in the system, you aren't going to have access to it.

Go buy a thumb drive or USB hard drive right now. They are so cheap they are practically free. If you can afford a bunch of $10 clips, you can afford a backup device, period. Plug the device into your computer. Drag and drop your video folder onto the device. Do the same for your entire "My Documents" folder and/or any other important store of documents. Unplug and store the device somewhere safe. Repeat at least once a week. Most operating systems have an automatic backup service built right in and they aren't too hard to set up, so you don't even have to manually drag your folders into a different window. The machine will do it for you on a regular basis. If you are smart (or just paranoid) you'll get TWO backup devices and make TWO backup copies regularly, then store one locally and one off-site. That way, you can even recover from a major disaster like fire, flood, or burglary

I did not know this! But yes, DEFINITELY do this if you've lost a bunch of clips from myself or another Vidown producer.

I confess I'm not as diligent as backing up like Soundguy, but the most I've lost in a HD crash is just some emails and pics that weren't any crushing blow. I do have multiple external drives with ALL the old SlapstickStuff videos (we're talking DVD contents as well as downloads), plus physical copies to boot. You don't know how many (retired) producers I know who don't even have copies of their OWN stuff anymore!! Crazy.

The real reason I don't have them doubled is because I'm afraid of showing by mistake some of my stuff to friends or my girlfriend (even she knows...).

I have two HD, one pluged always (without wam), one pluged when I want to store or watch...

But I'll take advantatge of your offer!!

You make my day man!!!

THANK YOU!!

I went through this earlier this year. Not for "everything" but a few months' worth of purchases anyway. MessMaster renewed ALL my downloads for UMD, with the same limitation as VIdown that the stores still have to be active.

I'll have to contact soundguy for my Vidown purchases.

I have had this happen to me. I asked for assistance here on the umd, in this forum and all I got was shunned for doing so. It came down to if I wanted to get my stuff back I would have to buy it all over again. With as much as I had and what it cost to get I was not eager to have to go out and buy everything all over again.

I would not hold your breath and even watch out for mess master who will insult you for not having everything backed up.

Maybe you will fair better then myself and others I have heard go through this aggravation.

You mean when you publicly called one of the main people you were asking for help "an insensitive, condescending dictator"? Can't figure why that strategy didn't work out.

https://umd.net/forums/producers-help

I like that I was offering to help even back then.

See Rich, if ONLY you had branched out into mud videos, you could've let that guy download 'em twice!

Speaking of which, I didn't have anyone picked out until now, but I think your unicorn is The One to mud wrestle Angie! Let's get on that!

She has not expressed an interest to mud wrestle as of yet. We'll see.

The trick will be getting Angie back too.

Yes you did, never said you didn't, but I did not buy any content from your site up to that time. So there was nothing for me to reobtain from you and I was not about to lie to try and get free downloads.

It's nice to see that people don't change or mature with age. The same picking on and bullying I got growing up I still get now just from a different crowd.

Piece of advice for all, you don't know who your talking to on here, you don't know what they are really like; myself included. I get very defensive thanks to the bullying I endured growing up, it's hard being a kid who is different and has special needs.