Joplin tornado survivor
 

I don't know how many of you know, but my wife and I moved from Springfield, MO to Joplin, MO about three weeks ago. We lived about four blocks directly east of that hospital that they have been showing on the news. It was a brand new home and it was completely wiped out. There are DVDs everywhere!!!! My wife and I rode it out in the laundry room with our three dogs and then walked out of the rubble without a scratch. We were very lucky. There are two or three of you that were about to mail some things to me. Pm me before you do so that I can get you a new address. I've got a lot going on, but I'll check in when I can and eventually when I can get a computer up and running I'll upload photos.

Wow - glad to hear you're ok. I remember you sent a PM stating you were moving and joked about being in southwest MO. I didn't make the connection.

If you need anything, let us know.
Is your collection a total loss, or was it spared?

ouch - that must have been something to get through.
but you escaped with your lives - hopefully you can focus on that positive note.

We have managed to salvage some possessions. Most of them are dented, scratched and water logged. We dug a lot of discs out of the rubble and have been cleaning them, but I'm going to have a lot of holes in the multi disc sets. All of the cases and artwork are ruined. I'm afraid I'm going to have to order empty cases by the pallet. It's going to take me months to sort out what I have and what I've lost.

I work from a home office so I also lost everything I use to make a living. It's a very slow process to rebuild, but my wife and I are making progress bit by bit.

I lost all of our computers and one of my hobby external drives. The other drive won't boot up after it blew down the street and then got rained on. I'm not sure what to do with it.

OnTrack can repair the bad drive: http://www.krollontrack.com/data-recovery/
It may cost $1,000, but it's worth it -- I've done it once myself.

I offsite backup as much as I can, including ISOs of DVDs and the master source files. Hopefullly you had some degree of backup plan in place. Having grown up in tornado alley, I've always been pretty good about trying to copy as much as I can for another location. In the old days, that meant photocopies of documents. Now it's scans and digital dupes.

Any video tapes you have can be recovered, too. Again, about $100/tape, but if there's anything important, it's not a total loss. Contact VideoInterchange or SpecBros for that one.

I wish I'd have gotten you all that X-MEN stuff sooner. I know we had been discussing a number of new sets. (Not that a DVD hobby is a priority right now, I'm sure.) After time has passed, and you've normalized life again, and want/need the video/artwork hobby, we'll be here to help you regain what we can.

Remember that the worst thing for a CD/DVD is sunlight. A DVD will probably be in better condition that a CD, too, because of how they are made (with DVD having the second protective upper polycarbonate layer, while the CD is unprotected and easy to damage).

On the samaritan side, I'll do what I can to help you out with some of the losses.
On the selfish side, I hope you didn't lose any of the really cool videos, menus, artwork, etc, that was in progress.

Take care, and report in once in a while. :)