If there’s ever a perfect example of why you back your stuff up, this is it. According to The Escapist, small Japanese MMO M2 has been completely deleted and won’t be coming back. Apparently there was some kind of emergency server maintenance back in October, and through the course of the crisis; the entire game was deleted.

Neither the publisher of the game nor its original developers have copies of the game files backed up, so they’re shutting it down. As this was a typical Free to Play Asian MMO, the entire game was made up of microtransactions; so all those shiny swords people paid real money for have just poofed into the ether. The publisher is promising conditional refunds for many players.

Imagine the Internet rage if something like this happened in the US.