The luck just keeps on coming
So, last week my PS3 randomly died. As in "one second it's working, the next it has turned itself off and will not reboot." I sent it in for repair to the tune of $180 (I wouldn't have bothered, with new units being $300, but mine was from the Metal Gear bundle, one of the last made that would play PS2 games, so that'd be another $100+ for a new PS2, controllers, etc. since I sold mine off to fund buying the PS3). Got it back today and they didn't repair it, just shipped me a new factory-certified refurb.
Which would be fine, except that the negative for this extra-fast turnaround was that they just slapped the new one in a box and didn't return my prior unit's hard disk. They advise you to back up your stuff before sending it in, but I couldn't since it uses a different file table than any PC in our house and, without it booting, I couldn't back up from within the PS3's OS. So I have now lost every saved file I had from 13 years of PS1, PS2 and PS3 gaming with no way to recover them--including my characters in War for Cybertron multiplayer mode, the Zeta Gundam save I'd been coming back to every 3 months or so for seven years, and my everything-unlocked Street Fighter IV save. In the grand scheme of things this wouldn't be a crushing blow or anything, but it feels like one more thing piled on a huge run of bad luck incidents that'd be meaningless one at a time but add up hard.
Which would be fine, except that the negative for this extra-fast turnaround was that they just slapped the new one in a box and didn't return my prior unit's hard disk. They advise you to back up your stuff before sending it in, but I couldn't since it uses a different file table than any PC in our house and, without it booting, I couldn't back up from within the PS3's OS. So I have now lost every saved file I had from 13 years of PS1, PS2 and PS3 gaming with no way to recover them--including my characters in War for Cybertron multiplayer mode, the Zeta Gundam save I'd been coming back to every 3 months or so for seven years, and my everything-unlocked Street Fighter IV save. In the grand scheme of things this wouldn't be a crushing blow or anything, but it feels like one more thing piled on a huge run of bad luck incidents that'd be meaningless one at a time but add up hard.