Thoughts on backups and sharing (and a recreation of the Terrorist break)

Last Wednesday my laptop was stolen from my flat. I'm in the process of claiming insurance to organise a replacement. That's the bad news. The good news is that my backup drive was not stolen. That means that when I get a replacement laptop, I'll have my years of work and data back as they were!

It's a strange situation I find myself in. I feel some kind of sadness for the loss of my instrument, and yet most of what I miss will be available to me again. I've maintained for years that it's the data, not the medium, that actually matters, but I still seem to be mourning the loss of my faithful machine!

A couple of obvious, but worth repeating, lessons from this:

1. Make regular backups. As regularly as you can, really. My last backup was 13 days before, which is definitely too long. Losing two weeks of work has had a huge psychological cost.
2. Keep 'off-site' backups. If my backup drive had gone, I really would have been up shit creek. At the very least, I need to be keeping a backup in another part of the house, and ideally at someone else's place. I'm considering finding a friend and organising a fortnightly backup swap with them. Any musicians out there keen?
3. Work in public, and share ferociously.

I'd like to elaborate on that last one. I lost two weeks of work, but that has been mitigated partly by the fact that I posted some of my work fragments to Soundcloud and shared files with collaborators and friends. Uploading the Pornogroove sketch that Kwrk and I made to Soundcloud means I now have a decent chance of recreating it; whether I should is a different matter! Similarly, I was pleased with the initial ideas present in this old-school jungle sketch. If I hadn't shared it, it would now be lost forever. Because I shared those Massive patches last week, I can now re-download them myself!

So, be promiscuous with your data. Share your samples, music collections, sketches and anything else you can. Let me know if you do, too. I want to get ma leech all up on that! You might be leery of sharing your "special sauce" but, if you have confidence in your abilities as a musician, you certainly need not worry about other people biting your sounds. Just keep moving forward and making good stuff. Then, when the inconceivable happens, you can hit up your mates for all the data you shared with them. Pro-tip: avoid DRM-locked data as it can be much harder or impossible to share.

In the spirit of working in public and sharing my work, and in case this loaner laptop gets stolen, I'm gonna share my recent recreation of the Terrorist break from the jungle classic by Renegade. It's available for download under a CC by-nc license. I've got another version of the break with the Hot Pants shakers laid on top, but I'm not yet happy with how they sound. Post a message in the comments or on Soundcloud if have any feedback about it!