[anamardoll]

I never cease to be amazed at the internet ratio of empathy to entitlement. Yes, of course the OP should have spent hundreds of dollars on Windows Home Server and off-site hard drives and cloud storage. It all makes sense now! I'm only surprised his butler didn't take care of that before this disaster -- I hope the OP has his people sternly punished for this.

I've been buying 1s and 0s since I was a kid. In those primitive and early days of the internet, it was understood that when you bought data, the company had an obligation to honor that contract even if you lost the data later. I still fondly recall the people at Spiderweb Software re-sending me my registration codes for Exile (now Avernum) after a disk crash. They did so because we believed -- and this is so primitive you'll wonder how we ever survived -- that replacing digital data that cost the company nothing to send was not the same thing as replacing physical media.

In these enlightened times, of course, we've evolved past that. Someone who spends $1,000 on digital data ($10 a book for 100 books) gets to also spend thousands of dollars on backups. If those backups fail or are stolen or if the cloud company goes out of business, then the onus is on the customer to re-spend those $1,000. Why shouldn't it be? Replacing that data for free would cost the publishing company thousands of their own dollars and negatively impact the other customers... oh wait. Well, hmm.

Sounds like I can only tell you that this is your Own Dang Fault and you should be out thousands of dollars based on the principle that...uh...I don't like your face. Or something.

Man, I sure do miss the early days. God bless Spiderweb Software. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go make sure that Jeeves is ready to ferry my external hard drive to Fort Knox via the armored truck service I own. Can't be too careful.