Ah, you mean because all the important information (minus the styles) is included in the pack?
Really good thing now that I've shared my styles folder back then with Old-Formats LWT, as well as sharing all of my custom sprite recolourings for New Formats as soon as I had made them. Or at least I believe I've uploaded all of them. Anyways, in case a certain type of sprite went missing, thanks to the recolouring feature, they're now easier to recreate than ever.
What kind of laptop did you end up buying? What about your previous one?
The current one is a Lenovo Legion 7, 15". The old one was an Acer from 2010, which started out at 4 GB RAM and 256 GB hard disk (non-SSD), but when said hard disk broke in 2018 while working on LWT, I exchanged it for an SSD and also increased the RAM to 8 GB, which was the maximum possible.
If you look up the Legion 7, you'll probably find that it has quite a hefty price tag. But I hope it will endure at least as long as the Acer - and since I know I can't upgrade the RAM or anything about it, because most modern laptops are "sealed shut" with nothing to screw open, any kind of upgrade I might have done later otherwise already needs to be built in.
If you're not already doing it, I would also recommend getting an external hard drive and backing up your files to it in addition to backing up to Dropbox. At least in this way, the advantage is that no internet connection is required to access the backup files on the external hard drive. Nowadays, external hard drives tend to be quite cheap as compared in years before. If your budget can allow it, you can get an external SSD drive for faster backing up. I remember back in 2008 while I was in college my laptop had to be reformatted due to being infected by a virus, and I felt so glad that I had been backing up my files on a weekly basis and was able to restore all my files.
I already have an external hard drive (1 TB) - that's where I took the system image from.
This is also the way I recovered from the crash during World Tour development - in that case, my system image had just been a few days old. But apparently, December 2018 was the latest one. Sadly, new system image backups often failed whenever I tried to create one (be it for lack of space on the external hard drive, despite its 1 TB size, or just because creating those backups took my laptop so long that it was always interrupted by something).
The reason I started saving every smaller file in Dropbox is because I live pretty close to a forest. And when the first crash happened (August 2018),
risk of forest fire was quite high here, so I thought "What use does an external hard drive have if I need to leave quickly? Then both my PC and my hard drive are in the same place and can be destroyed."
Thus, ironically, the existence of my external hard drive did me more harm than good this time:Had I known that my rebooting attempt would fail, I would have extracted the old SSD hard drive directly. Then all the current data would still be on it (from between December 2018 and now). The system image allowed for a temporary recovery, but only for a couple of hours today - and it came at the cost of everything that was on that hard drive from between December 2018 and now. Because of course, a system image overwrites everything on the target hard drive.
December 2018, that's a few months after the initial release of Old-Formats LWT. And shortly before the test version of New Formats with the Shimmier was released. Lemmings Open Air pretty much revolves around the Shimmier completely.
All my levels could be retrieved from Dropbox.
However, some of the older New-Formats levels produce errors when I open them in the editor, telling me "an object reference was not linked to an object instance"?
This is a rough translation of the German error message; it refers to "JIT" debugging (just-in-time debugging).For Lemmings Open Air, I fortunately uploaded the ZIP file containing 111 of 120 levels just a few days ago. So I can just replace my versions of the levels that display this error with the ones from the ZIP file. And this error has so far only occurred on some of the earliest levels made for Lemmings Open Air. This is a small minority, and none of my newest levels made shortly before the crash were affected.
I'm a little worried about Lemmings, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll and Lemmings: Hall of Fame now. Because I haven't shared any test versions of those yet. So even though they're also complete in Dropbox, those copies are all I have (the earliest ones might also be on the external hard drive, and those would be the most crucial ones).
Maybe namida can tell me a little more about these JIT debugging / object-instance errors? If it's just something present or absent in the level text file, it should be potentially easy to fix.