Unfortunately my PS3 broke down on Tuesday and it was returned just today, about 2 hours ago. I had bought on the 21st of last September, so I suppose I was lucky enough that the 1-year warranty had not expired, or else I don't know what I'd do right now.

The thing is though, I've very sad about the whole thing, because the PS3 wasn't fixed, rather it was replaced. When I was told so at the store I straightly asked them why weren't I contacted first to know what will happen, and the guy working there told me that Sony has pretty much stopped repairing consoles and they just replace them.

"And what about my data? My games, my movies?"
"Well, unfortunately... They're gone. But, even though I can not sign for it, they may have copied the contents of your old hard drive into this new one."

But that was not the case. Right now I had a completely new PS3 that has been turned on for less than 3 minutes, but without any data, at all.

There go my trophies -but who does give a damn about trophies really-, there go the savegames of all my games (the ones I'll greatly miss: RDR, GTA4, Uncharted 2, Demon's Souls [yeah...], AC2, FF13, FF9 [I spent almost 50 days during summer creating a perfect file and I completed it about 12 days ago...]), there go my games (even though I can download most of them again, I lost the two freebies by Sony after PSN got back online).

Do you have any similar stories all? Personally trying to fathom that I'll have to restart DS and I'll never see my lvl167 character, leaves me with an urge to quit gaming immediately.

Isn't it possible to make a back up of all that stuff? I am sure you can wirelessly connect to your PS3 and move everything over or maybe back up the hard drive by putting it into your PC?

Uhm ....

Back in 1989, the United States Army invaded the Republic of Panama to liberate us from a dictator, accused of drug trafficking charges. He had murdered opposers, brutally punished protesters and getting this bloodsucking tick off our back hurt our economy greatly and led to the death of many civilians during the invasion itself.

That's the greatest disaster I've ever survived. My school year ended up getting cut short, there was looting, war, the sound of planes and helicopters hovering our skies for several nights, orange lights from fires in the background and reports of people we knew, personally or public figures, telling their harrowing experiences. My grandparents were staying with us that night and had they been at their place, it would have been horrible, since they lived near a military compound that got hammered with heavy fire.

Luckily, I was never in the thick of it during the invasion per se, but I do have memories of walking the dog and getting past a U.S. Platoon doing rounds in my neighborhood or taking pictures at a downed helicopter and I'll never forget the first economic infusion our country got after the invasion, being carried in an armored truck, protected by a blackhawk chopper flying just overhead of our buildings.

So when I read a topic labeled "disaster" and I read a PS3 sad tale, apologies if it doesn't feel that disastrous at all. :-) It is sad and anger inducing, but it's just very, very far from a disaster.

Yes, apparently, real-life disasters are far more agonizing than cyber or data disasters, I am sorry for your experiences - I have likewise experiences of my own, mainly with relatives dying in front of me or destroyed houses due to earthquakes.

My mistake, I should have named the topic "gaming disasters".

You know, the PS3 has an external backup function. It takes all of 5 minutes to backup your savegames.

Also, PS+ membership carries the option to upload up to 150 MB of savegames to the cloud service.

Also, if you've synched you're trophies, they're not gone.

I was in Poland when Chernobyl went tits up. Granted, I wasn't in the actual city but still it was quite freaky getting herded to the basement of your local religion class and being given iodine.

PS3 disasters are first world problems :D.

You can, but Sony makes it a complete pain in the ass to do. You have to either back up the files manually file by file or you have to back up the entire disk. Which requires that you have a USB HDD that's at least as large as the HDD in the unit.

Which is probably the biggest temptation I have for cracking my PS3. Granted I don't think XBox users can back up at all without cracking, but still. I might be missing something, but that function requires an external HDD with space to back up the entire PS3 HDD. The alternative if you just want the game data is to manually back up every single game by hande.

If I'm wrong please enlighten me, I'd rather not waste my time or back up more data than I really need to.

It's a moot suggestion really. The Xbox doesn't need to backup because the Xbox does not fail.

Really, so all those RRODs never happened? Seriously, as far as I know they've resolved that particular issue, but don't you think all those folks would have loved to have been able to back up their saves before losing them to a unit that died.

Plus, it's nice to be able to back up saves for future use with emulators. Sure we're talking years down the road, but still.

Yeah for sure, that was a fanboy joke really.

I've played 47 games on my Xbox, and each has 5 - 50 saves. That a bullshit amount of manual transferring.

I should have seen the irony there

I've got a varying amount of game saves depending upon the game, FO:NV is the one that pisses me off the most because I'd like to be able to back it up when I start over, but backing up 50+ saves one at a time is just ridiculous. Perhaps the cracks finally work, the last time I tried it the claims of cracking were completely inaccurate.

No worries, and apologies if my reply sounded a bit "woe me" which was not really my intent. In fact, a "real disasters you've survived" thread sounds like a good idea, but also a pretty depressing one.

Okay, so I checked my PSN account after connecting to PSN with this new PS3, and apparently the only thing that I'll miss are my save files.

PSN keeps a record of every account's downloads and you can access the log and re-download everything, from PSone games you've bought, to old PS3 demos, games and themes. For everyone who may be interested, you can find it in "account management -> transaction history -> download list" or something similar.

Thankfully this feature was cool, because at first I could not find Medievil (it appeared after a search) and re-download it (some account or region problem, it wouldn't let me) from PSN, but in the end it worked and I re-downloaded it, initializing the download from that list.

And yeah, Stonebro was right, trophies aren't gone, but I'd gladly switch them for my save files. Oh well.

The problem is the backup feature only works in case the hard drive goes out as it is connected to that PS3 and can only be used on that PS3, can't use it on another PS3 (unless they changed it recently).

Also, transferring just the saves to a flash drive or something can work, so long as the saves are not copy-protected, which will not allow them to work on another console or even another user on the same console.

You could have just kept the hard drive, you silly man.