My 7 1/2 Year Old PS3 Died - Thank God for Playstation Plus Online Storage!!!!

So, I bought a 60 GB "Fat" Playstation 3 in December 2006 for the ungodly sum of $599.  Since then, and until this past Sunday, my PS3 got weekly if not daily use.  There was a period of time when I was running it 24/7 for bspec events in GT5 and Folding Home.  It served me quite well.  A couple of years ago I bought two extra PS3s and two extra copies of GT5 for triple screen GT5 action.  The cost was worth every penny and triple screen GT5 and now GT6 has been awesome.  Anyway, about a year ago I noticed that I was having trouble with the HDMI connection in my original PS3.  In summary, the cable would sometimes need to be pushed in or wiggled to get a video signal on my monitor.  This past Sunday the connection issue finally pushed me over the top.  I tried several different things to get a video signal.  When I finally got it back by switching out cables, the PS3 needed to restore its file system.  While it was in restore mode, it apparently overheated and so I got the dreaded flashing red lights.  Unfortunately, my GT6 disk was still in the damn drive.  

Anyway, I powered down the PS3 for the night and tried again on Monday morning.  The problem continued and so I knew that my PS3 had finally died a good death, after serving me well for 7 1/2 years.  Now, had this happened several years ago, I would have been totally screwed because my saves were only stored locally, on the hard drive.  But, I have Playstation Plus and had fortunately enabled the online storage feature that backs up all of my game saves, including for GT6, GT5, The Last of Us and GTA V to the cloud!!!  So, I traded in a bunch of stuff on Monday and picked up a brand new 500 GB PS3.  On Monday night, I fired it up and logged in using my main PSN account (I have three accounts total, one for the main PS3 and two others the "client" PS3s for triple screen GT6)).  It took some time but eventually my game saves showed up and I was able to copy them to my new PS3 hard drive.  I had to buy an extra copy of GT6, since my original PS3 ate my disk and would not give it back.    I installed GT6 and fired it up.  The game detected my save just fine.  I downloaded the digital content, including the 15th Anniversary cars.  At this point, I am about $200 poorer, but I am back to triple screen GT6 action, which I am enjoying every day now.

So, my message to you all is that you should get Playstation Plus and you definitely should enable the automatic backup to online storage feature!!!  That way, if your PS3 fails, like mine did, you have a back up of your game saves.  This is the wave of the future and it is particularly valuable for games like GT5 and GT6, where our game saves can take literally years to develop.  My GT5 game save goes back to December 2010!!!!  Steam and Origin have implemented cloud saves for most, but not all of the games available from those services.  The cloud saves have proven to be really helpful to me.  The Xbox One automatically backs up game saves to the cloud and this is very helpful should the console fail.