Idea for Fantasy Grounds to make more money

[unerwünscht]

I know Doug and JPG were looking at all kinds of options for building a monthly rental model to generate a more reliable income off of Fantasy Grounds, and I know there were some good ideas and some bad ideas tossed around.

I have an idea, that just might be something that gets even those of us with Ultimate licenses ready and willing to toss money at you on a regular basis. Remote storage for all of our game data and characters. I just had a hard drive crash on me last week, and that resulted in the loss of roughly 4 years of campaign data, modules, tokens, maps, and characters. Needless to say, it has been kind of devastating to our groups. But remote storage might be something that I would be willing to pay a yearly subscription for, provided it was reasonably priced.

[Nylanfs]

The only problem I see with that really is possible copyright issues

[kane280484]

I just had a hard drive crash on me last week, and that resulted in the loss of roughly 4 years of campaign data, modules, tokens, maps, and characters. Needless to say, it has been kind of devastating to our groups.Horrible, I recommend everyone to backup to cloud once in a month.

[Mask_of_winter]

I lost all my data once and have taken precautions that it won't happen again. I have both the cloud and external hd backup.

[GM BK]

Bought an external hard drive specifically for this reason.... i back up all my data... been burned way too many times...

[Nylanfs]

I'm building a raid system right now for a permenant backup system

[damned]

I'm building a raid system right now for a permanent backup system

RAID provides redundancy as opposed to backup... of course using RAID on your backup is good!
:)


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[ddavison]

I'm sorry to hear about the hard drive crash. That is never fun. I hate having to re-install everything.

RAID is nice for a desktop system. It doesn't help as much with laptops since they don't normally have room for enough drives to make RAID doable. I copy stuff around to several locations/systems within my house and over the net, but I still wouldn't look forward to having to recover them.

Linking all your purchases with the patch system definitely makes recovery of Fantasy Grounds easier, but doing something else for your campaign data would be a good idea.

[Andraax]

It doesn't help as much with laptops since they don't normally have room for enough drives to make RAID doable.

Network attached RAID array - every device in the house can use it (including phones and tablets). This is what I have.

That said, you still need to have important stuff backed up off-site. If your house burns down, it's likely your RAID array won't survive.

[Nylanfs]

I thought we just made a federal info request to the NSA if that happened.

[Griogre]

You can, but you know the government it will be several years before they process your request and then actually *find* the data. :p ;)

[JohnD]

I would think this kind of service is exactly what Smiteworks should not touch even with someone else's 10' pole.

All they need is for one time to have something go wrong and then some random user who only shows up every 9-13 months or so to rail at how shitty everything is and all the bad decisions that are being made will have a field day that their stuff couldn't be recovered.

We should all be responsible for our own back-up regime IMO.

[Findanniin]

Related Tangential:

Reddit D&D has 72.000 subscribers. That's 72k of target audience, gathered in one place.
In the sidebar - under play online: all of these people are linked to... You guessed it: "Roll20".

Edit: And I see it got changed a few hours after this post. Well done :).

[ddavison]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm continually amazed at how often our community members reach out to us to help us gain more visibility or improve our product.

[damned]

Related Tangential:

Reddit D&D has 72.000 subscribers. That's 72k of target audience, gathered in one place.
In the sidebar - under play online: all of these people are linked to... You guessed it: "Roll20".

Edit: And I see it got changed a few hours after this post. Well done :).


And with the awesome Fantasy Grounds 5e ruleset - thats a great find Findanniin.


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[Dershem]

I store my campaign data in drop box!

[damned]

Hi Talysian - hopefully you are storing backups in Dropbox and havent set your live campaign data to DropBox...
There have been plenty of instances where someones campaign data was lost or damaged due to a sync occurring at the same time as data was being written to the db file...
I zip my campaign file up before or after game and throw that into dropbox...


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[Dershem]

I am setting my campaign data there... thanks for the heads up....

[Zeus]

Here's a tip. Recycle your old PC hardware and repurpose them into a low cost network attached storage array complete with all the storage functionality you could hope for, all for the cost of a small 8GB USB memory stick.

https://www.freenas.org

Network storage is great for hosting media on your home network like pictures, music, videos, movies etc. as it facilitates very easy sharing to a variety of playback clients and devices in the home.

I use FreeNAS extensively, it supports RAID0-6 volumes and ZFS file system so you get enterprise functionality like filesystem point in time snapshot, encryption and journalling. It also support a variety of file sharing protocols so once created its trivial to setup CIFS/NFS/AFP shares which can then be mounted by clients on your network seamlessly. It can even mimic backup storage for Apple's TimeMachine (e.g. TimeCapsule).

As I am rather paranoid about my data I take snapshots of my network storage every 15 minutes and a full backup weekly. I mainly use Apple Mac desktops and laptops and so these systems are protected by Apple's proprietary TimeMachine software which uses a separate volume on the FreeNAS server as a pseudo TimeCapsule storage pool. The setup works great for me as it allows me to recover local files to any point in time and network data to a 15 minute window.

[Mirloc]

Here's a tip. Recycle your old PC hardware and repurpose them into a low cost network attached storage array complete with all the storage functionality you could hope for, all for the cost of a small 8GB USB memory stick.

https://www.freenas.org

Network storage is great for hosting media on your home network like pictures, music, videos, movies etc. as it facilitates very easy sharing to a variety of playback clients and devices in the home.

I use FreeNAS extensively, it supports RAID0-6 volumes and ZFS file system so you get enterprise functionality like filesystem point in time snapshot, encryption and journalling. It also support a variety of file sharing protocols so once created its trivial to setup CIFS/NFS/AFP shares which can then be mounted by clients on your network seamlessly. It can even mimic backup storage for Apple's TimeMachine (e.g. TimeCapsule).

As I am rather paranoid about my data I take snapshots of my network storage every 15 minutes and a full backup weekly. I mainly use Apple Mac desktops and laptops and so these systems are protected by Apple's proprietary TimeMachine software which uses a separate volume on the FreeNAS server as a pseudo TimeCapsule storage pool. The setup works great for me as it allows me to recover local files to any point in time and network data to a 15 minute window.

I'll second the FreeNAS devices. I've set several of them up as central media servers for music and videos for XBMC (sorry Kodi now...) setups, and they work like a charm. easy to set up, configure and maintain - plus you can run a killer centralized server with exceptionally modest hardware.

Personally I use BeyondCompare to update my files on the server and distribute them between my laptop and my desktop while keeping a backup on my server. The nice part of this method is I control the backup, the bad part is I do have an tendency to forget. ;)