Thanksgiving and PS3 Game Saves

Thanksgiving is a time of thanks and forgiveness, and is something I want to emphasize before I segway into the next topic: backing up your game saves.

The good news is that my PS3 system has been replaced.  The bad news?  My old PS3 hard drive can't be read with all my saves on it.  This is because Sony enables an encryption key that is unique between the hard drive and system such that, should the drive enter another system, it would be completely unreadable.

So now, I have a useless drive that can't be read by any device other than the original PS3, which was replaced.

I've certainly went through my "denial" stage, trying attempt after attempt to recover my old hard drive to no avail.  I've tried swapping the drive from the maintenance menu, I've tried to connect it to a windows or mac to access the files, and nothing.  I get nothing.

So that's it.  Gone are the hours spent in Disgaea leveling up weapons and items.  Lost are the unique levels I've spent days creating in Little Big Planet 2.  All the games I've only partially played through only to hope to finish at a later date...vanished.  I'm definitely wounded from the experience, but at this point there's nothing left to do but to get back up and start walking again.

Thankfully, I have a working PS3 system once more.  Thankfully, my progress still lives on in trophy achievements.  Thankfully, all my DLC is tied to my PSN account so that I can download them once more to my system.  Thankfully, I can return to playing the games I still yearn to play.  I don't have time to be stubborn, to waste time wishing I backed up files.  I've got games to play AND backup.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.