Request for Help from DH.N

I've been holding off on making this post for several days 'cause I feel awful about doing it.

There are so many updates to DetroitHockey.Net that I had hoped to launch already. The Fifteenth Season was supposed to be one where the site was kind of reborn. I still expect that to happen but given the momentum I had in September, I'm disappointed that I haven't published any of the updates from my to-do list.

And despite the fact that I feel like I'm under-delivering, I'm asking for help from the community.

Sometime Christmas weekend, the hard drive that I store all of my site-related files on suffered a catastrophic failure. A bearing inside the drive appears to have burned out, making it inoperable. All data on it is inaccessible.

My latest manual backup of that data is from October and is incomplete. I'm still taking stock of what I've lost but at the very least I'm missing the original copies of my photos from two games, all of the video I've captured this season but not added to the site, any graphics I've updated since the backup, and countless other personal documents and files related to other sites.

If I want that data back, I have little choice but to send the drive to a data recovery specialist, which will cost more than I can afford to pay for it.

I'm asking the community for a little help with this. I hate to do it but I feel like it's either ask for help or lose the data and this is worth a shot.

If you have the ability, please consider making a donation to DH.N.

I want to make clear that the site will continue to function whether I get the data back or not. No code was lost due to this because the most recent code exists on DH.N's servers. The data loss may cause difficulties for me. It will mean fewer videos get added to the site. It won't cause an outage or loss of existing functionality.

If, after a week or so, I don't think we have a chance of raising the money needed to do the data recovery, I'll refund all donations and look into other (less-reliable) options.

If there are any questions, feel free to ask. Thank you for your support.

My thanks go out to everyone who donated to DH.N over the last week in support of my data recovery efforts. I'm surprised and humbled by your support.

Unfortunately - and as I had somewhat expected - I can see that it won't be enough. The cost of data recovery is just too high.

As such, I'm calling this fundraising effort closed and refunding the donations that were made.

I don't see this as a bad thing, I've accepted that the data is probably lost and that I can live without it. As an experiment, I'm going to try and DIY it and I'm really excited about the chance to tinker a bit.

One of the reasons I'm willing to pull the plug on this so quickly is that there are two much more important fundraising efforts going on that right now that need support a lot more than I do.

The Production Line is leading the H2H2 pledge drive. As with last year's event, the money raised goes to Children's Hospital of Michigan.

Jen (@NHLhistorygirl) is raising money for SOAR. You can visit her fundraiser page at http://www.crowdrise...ndraiser/Team14.

Both of those are far more important than helping me get some files, so I recommend that anyone who was going to send money my way donate to either of those causes instead. I'll be doing the same.

Thanks again for everyone's support.