DevLog: ANOTHER Hardware Failure (BUT... We're So Back!)

Quick reminder: You can follow development more closely on the Trello board.

TLDR;

• Got a temporary PC the day after the motherboard hardware failure

• Replaced motherboard successfully 🎉

• SSD metadata was corrupted

• System + All data is restored - BACK TO WORK

✅ Last Week's Progress

What I accomplished since the last update:

Temporary PC

A close friend of mine just so happened to have replaced his 6 year old PC and offered it up as a temporary workstation until I get my replacement motherboard. This was a big stress-relief, as I could just plug in my hard-drives into. I was able to run Blender within Linux (Ubuntu) 🐧❤️ The only issue that I noticed while using this setup, was that it would freeze every once in a while (remember this part for later).

Replacement Motherboard

Thankfully, the day after the "incident", I ordered a replacement motherboard which showed up Wednesday. The replacement took me about 2 hours - yes, slow, but I was methodical and careful! I didn't want more unexpected issues.
When I turned it on, it worked all exactly as expected 🤓. I then began to work on re-working my backup solution (obligatory 3-2-1 Backup Rule mention); because before I work on anything, backups are the first thing to get working properly. But as I was backing up the SSD that contains EoTC game source files, Blender source files, DAZ3d files, EoTC documentation, etc. my entire system would freeze completely. "Huh, strange.. that's the same issue that I had with the temporary PC, but same SSDs." And it'd happen without fail, every time I tried to access the SSD, or back it up.

Corrupt SSD (Solid State Drive) Metadata

I won't bore you with the details, but after about a day of troubleshooting, I discovered that this SSD had corrupt metadata (possibly from the Motherboard issue from last week) and while Windows would've possibly been more equipped to automatically handle and fix the corrupt metadata, Linux wasn't able to recover it and just froze.
Thankfully, once I figured this out, it wasn't difficult to fix - just format the SSD to EXT4 (more supported by Linux), which addresses the corrupt metadata problem.

🛠️ Current Development

What I'm working on right now:

I'll be so real with you: I'm so burnt out by the last 7 days of hardware hell. I just want to get back to working on scenes again. 😭 ... which brings us to:

Scene 8 - Oh boy. I feel like we've been here before. I'm doing some final checks to make sure that Linux is going to provide the same exact results (I'm pretty sure it will, but best to double check). And from there, I'll be finishing up Scene 8.

⚙️ Technical Corner

If you're interested in the discovery of what the issue was with the SSD:

💬 Community Corner

I appreciate everyone's patience. This has been a rough week and I feel guilty that I've now put Echoes of The Cataclysm a week behind on development. I'll be working extra hard to output scenes faster to make up for the lost time.

See you in the next one! ™️

Don't forget to check out the Trello board for detailed progress updates! ❤️