A personal experience from 5 or 6 years ago.
Along with working in tech for years, I am a musician. Over the course of a few years, I wrote and recorded an album’s worth of music. I demoed each song with my own equipment, playing every instrument in my rehearsal space. I also recorded demos with friends, song ideas, alternate versions – the things musicians do.
I also work in IT and like the barefooted children of the shoemaker, I failed to follow the common-sense backup practices I insisted all of my clients follow. All of this data, years of work, on a single external hard drive.
I was in a studio to exhaust my savings by recording my first album, a solo project. I was nearly complete. The opening track started with a long, distant, mournful guitar, drenched in reverb. I thought it would be a nice touch if the opening song on the album – the first time my music had been recorded properly, the first to see a real release other than my lo-fi black metal demos – started with the lo-fi original demo intro before abruptly snapping into the studio recording. I placed the external drive on a table, sat in a rolling chair, placed laptop on lap, and connected the drive to copy the WAV file of the intro. From my position, the screen of the laptop obstructed my view of the drive. Someone in the room asked me to look at something, so I kicked away from the table, knowing my laptop would go with me, forgetting that my entire musical history was attached to with a very short cable. I flew back; the drive followed.
I still see it vividly, cinematically: the black drive, a Western Digital MyBook, moving towards the ground like an olympic diver. I dove for it but was too late. It hit, vertically, still powered on, and immediately began clicking. My laptop was unable to detect it plugged in. I lost everything.
Thankfully, I knew all of my music and I had MP3 versions of all of the demos for reference, but the WAVs and the project files were gone, as were all song pieces, demos, and my early history. The album went on to be well received in the metal community and #3 is set to be released April, but I’m still sad that I’ll never be able to revisit all of the original versions of my earliest music.
TL;DR: Did not backup, lost all demos and song ideas comprising a few years of work.
