Recovering data ain't no joke, and isn't cheap. That is why ever hard drive I own I also own a duplicate that I back up to every few days. This way if one dies, I don't lose too much. FYI, I have 15 hard drives *IN* my current PC, but I'm not very typical
Anyway, I also have Fractal Terrains. It is the *best* world generation software out there, and trust me, I have tried them all. My only issue with it is that there is no ability to call the application from another, so you have to start it up and manually plug in everything to get those numbers.
I have tried, multiple times, to write my own system to create planets. I wasn't going the 100% fractal route like fractal terrains or all the other generators out there. Instead, I was going to generate random plates, perform plate tectonics over a few billion years, and create/erode the terrain that way. I figured it would be easier to code since my fractal knowledge sucks. However my really poor capabilities with geometry/trig and algorithms dealing with graphics keep killing any attempts I have to do this. You can see an app I wrote that uses a fractal terrain world, and then maps it down to individual hexes at my blog at
http://btengineer.blogspot.com/2012_03_01_archive.html.
Basically, I planned on having something like fractal terrains output on the world level, and then each pixel would represent 10km on the surface of the planet. Those 10km chunks would simply be a few hundred maps that would *hopefully* be procedural, otherwise they'd just be manually made but tileable. Then, I could generate thousands of worlds and only use a few megabytes each. Every single hex on those worlds would even be persistent, and if you burned a forest down, came back later, it'd be all ash, come back a few years later, it'd start to regrow. Even underwater would be mapped, and each region would have base temp/rain/etc, and dynamic weather would occur on a 10km region by 10km region basis. And of course all that takes into account orbital patterns and rotations.
These worlds are to be used in my strategic battletech like (so BT, but with all the names changed) game so you could technically play a single infantry trooper, on a single planet, or scale all the way out to a dozen divisions fighting over terra.
But without those maps, I'm at an impasse
I even tried to hire a few companies to do it, none could put their money where their mouth was (they were app developers, not graphics, and those are 2 very different skills).
I find it amazing that with all the processing power of today's computers as well as the lack of expense with massive storage, that nobody has produced a method to do this yet. Somehow tho, they justify huge amounts of time on level builders and creating these detailed levels, when dynamic maps could instead be created in each scenario procedurally.
