Any way to "reverse compile"?

So after backing up to restore my computer, the USB drive I used immediately stopped working. I didn't put it on Dropbox because we have the lowest end DSL (it's so slow I'm sure dial-up is faster).

Now the project I need to "reverse compile" is a remake of a classic game I was doing for personal learning etc. However, I already had a whole other project BASED ON this classic remake (after a while it was nothing the same) which was also lost in the backup.

I DON'T want to have to START ALL OVER but I did find a previous share from the Dropbox when I was showing the game to a few friends. I've copied this to my computer with a few other things I've lost along the way.

If anyone, in general, doesn't know how perhaps an admin/developer of C2 could help? I'm really not in the mood to start over from scratch here, but I will if I must. I'll send a copy to anyone who is willing to help.

Thank you,

Rory

PS: I got a new monitor so I can continue work, so yay!

Did the usb drive just stop working or did it’s file system get corrupted?

If it’s the latter you may have luck with a recovery tool that just scans the drive in a low level way and gets any files it can find.

If it’s the former there are companies that can recover data off of broken hardware like that. I’ve never used it but from what I saw they often let you send your device to them and they’ll look at it and give you a quote to do the recovery. You may be able to just contact them to get a ballpark estimate since I’m guessing it’s case by case.

Anyways cheers

With regard to 'reverse compiling' an exported project, this is obviously impossible, for quite obvious anti-piracy reasons.

So unless you can use a drive recovery program or company, then it's likely you will have to start again, or from whatever old backup you may have.

The drive stopped working, no power. The only data recovery company that I could find online (which should give all of them) is in California and is extremely expensive (money maybe Bill Gates has)

With regard to 'reverse compiling' an exported project, this is obviously impossible, for quite obvious anti-piracy reasons.

So unless you can use a drive recovery program or company, then it's likely you will have to start again, or from whatever old backup you may have.

I wouldn't say it's impossible. Someone with sufficient motivation and programming skill could write a program to do it (with a little help from the user). Most of the relevant project information still exists within the output data.js file, and is only protected by security through obscurity. It would simply become a matter of trying to fill in the blanks to generate a complete and working project. Successful de-compiling may require several attempts and educated guesses by the user (similar to actual reverse engineering), but a determined enough individual could do it.

I imagine such a program would be highly frowned upon here though, as while it would be useful for project recovery, it could also be used as a tool to steal other people's finished games.

Many users are worried about other people reverse-engineering their projects, so exported projects are actually deliberately designed to be as hard to reverse-engineer as possible. So I'm afraid you've learned the hard way why you need to keep backups. These days just copying it to Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive etc. is a free and easy way to make a reliable backup.

If your not hardware aware ask a friend with experience to do this for you.

1. Take the hard drive out of its the USB unit.

2. open your computer and try connecting it directly.

or

If that doesn't work for you maybe the board on the hard drive is damaged, but it possibly can be replaced with a second hand duplicate model you find on eBay, I've done this before and has got me out of trouble.

Best of luck friend.

Thanks for the suggestion WhosWho, but the option is off the table now.

If there's a way to lock this post, it's literally impossible at this point. I got frustrated and smashed the USB drive at this point. lol

I would rather just start from scratch.

Locked at OP's request