Do I need to re-download everything?

My hard drive went bad on my computer so a new one was installed.
It appears that I've lost ALL my BigFish games that I had downloaded.

Any idea what I can do to avoid this in the future? I had a LOT of games downloaded.

All of the games you bought are still on BF. You can to go to the your account tab then to purchased games. You will need to re-download them, but once purchased, the games are yours forever. The only way to avoid this happening again is to transfer your games to an external hard drive(I think, I'm no techie).This happened to me also. I feel your pain.

thracia

I will move you to glitches for help on how to back them up.

Ana

This would be a good question for Big Fish.
As far as I know, even if you've backed up the game folder, if you're using a new Windows installation on a new hard drive, you have to download in order to activate the game. Otherwise it just plays as a demo and expires.

Yep, if you reformatted or installed a new hard drive, you'll need to reactivate the games. I don't own any Bigfish games, but I have downloaded games from several other sites. Most of the time the same key can be reused up to a limit set by the publisher.

I ran into a similar issue when I upgraded to Windows 8. Apparently, even a new OS invalidates the activation. I had to activate them again when I bowed out of the Windows 8 thing.

I have all my digital downloads in their own folders (including the activation keys) and back them up to an external drive periodically. Reinstalling them again is a snap when all of the required files are in one place.