Dude that suuuuuuuuuckkksssss…
I had a bunch of songs on my Spectralis 2 that wasn’t backed up. The internal harddrive was damaged and wouldn’t load any songs/patterns.
Thankfully, the harddrive mounts to a computer like a USB drive… and I WAS eventually able to retrieve the data with programs.
It’s actually happened to me a few times!
I think sometimes those problems end in good things. Helps you get a fresh start, new look at things. Sometimes I go back to songs that are ‘okay’ but, if I wipe them and start over, I write something completely better.
OUCH! That’s a bummer Accent.
Story #1:
I once had a friend accidentally spill a beer into my laptop, which was on at the time. We all froze in shock as the bottle of beer went “glug glug glug” right into the keybed of my Mac Book Pro. I quickly hit the power button and lifted the computer upside down so the beer would run out. I ended up taking the face plate off of the computer and sitting it under a fan for a few days. Once i put it all back together, it worked just fine!
Story #2:
I worked as an animator at Microsoft, years ago. We used to check our work files in and out from the master server, every day. Well, I’m not a PC guy (Mac rules the design world) and I wasn’t used the file naming rules that apply to PC files. Long story short, I added a symbol to one of my file names and when I checked it in to the main server, it deleted about three weeks of my work! Fucking computers, man.
Story #3:
Okay, this happened to my good friend, but it’s still an awesome story.
My friend worked at an architectural firm back in the early 2000’s. At the time there was a big virus being spread around the web via email (virus name was some woman’s name …Linda, Suzy, or some shit). Well, my friend must have been the only person in the entire world that hadn’t heard about it, because when he got the exact email that everyone had been warned about, he fucking opened it! The virus took over the entire firms system and they had to shut down for a day or two. Whoops!
I also know a guy in Seattle who got an entire sky scraper evacuated and the Haz-mat team called. But that’s a different topic!
back in the early '90s i stored all my sysex dumps and midi songs on an 88 meg SyQuest removable drive. every song i’d ever written, every patch i’d ever programmed. for the past 5 years. so of course the drive died.
went into a serious depression and could not touch a keyboard, guitar, tape recorder, anything for 18 months. my mood contributed to my getting divorced. eventually music became my theray again.
now everything i write is MILES better than what i lost. and i learned that no matter how awesome the track is i’m creating, one day i’m going to write something even better.
that gives me the confidence to fuck with “the rules” and write in my own style. cuz i know that i can lose samples and stems, but knowledge is mine forever.
@robotunes ah that makes me feel better. thanks.
@accent that sucks! at least it wasn’t your own stupidity like most of my problems are! 
i’ve been thinking about using iCloud or dropbox for my small non-audio data files. just to get in the habit of backing them up.
last night, thought i was recording something really good, look over 2 hours later i’d only hit play without arming record! 
still feeling super blah. i haven’t made that dumb a mistake in years. at least i don’t have to edit it down 
…maybe i need to start recording to two places at once…or wire up a gigantic recording light so i can’t space on it…!
the upshot, i think, is that i’ve never made the exact same mistake twice.
…although most of the times i screw up it has to do with recording and not realizing it until hours have passed… arming the wrong track, levels too hot, windows update auto-restart! that one was pretty funny looking back. the computer must have been restarted for at least an hour. i couldn’t trust windows after that. 
My worst loss was not nearly as bad as some of your stories, but perhaps it was the context:
I tend to work long hours on my music, and it is not uncommon to pull 12-15 hour sessions on score prep/production. One evening I made what I still consider to be one of my own fave tunes- to this day. After 12 hours of solid progress, resulting in a bouncy house tune, mixed JUST so, arranged JUST so. The parts melded perfectly into the limiter, the final product somehow resembled my favorite old school artists- warmth punch, raw and wrong and ready to just enjoy. I was so, so, so excited to have made a track in a night that I felt proud of, especially back when I only had a couple tunes finished.
The next morning, I opened up the project file to show my now fiance.
“would you like to restore your crashed session?”
“hm… I don’t remember ableton crashing last night… and it was only hours ago!” yes, restore
The project was blank, the whole arrangement and all its glory, just vanished, gone into the ether. The thing is… the next thing I did was… I accidentally pressed command-S instead of command-Z… Saving the blank slate… !!!
Turns out, the night before, I accidentally highlighted my arrangement (which should be a disable-able or multi-step function IMO) and pressed delete (accidentally of course) just as I was quitting, or just before. This crashed my Live, and upon opening it the next morning, offered me the option to undo the damage.
Saving it destroyed the undo steps. I’ve always wondered about that moment, when I had a chance to save that project that got away. Still haven’t quite gotten over it…
So, the rush of the writing process, the lull of deep, well deserved sleep, and the crash and burn upon discovering the horrible truth! I got one bounce of it, and have since moved to saving the progress of songs with appended numbers, to be safe… I couldn’t touch my computer for a week.
tldr: Made a project, accidentally saved a deleted arrangement over it, died a little inside.
Same issue 2 weeks ago… No more patterns nor kits… Last sysex save was more than 1 year ago… sniff
That’s too bad. But maybe you’ll come up with new (and even better) stuff faster then you would have expected. After all your experience isn’t wiped 
I actually never stored a preset besides an Init patch I make for a new synth.
Nothing actually music related: (LONG military career/USAF Pilot) Training flight with a second seat directly behind me, The guy had already gone through the typical barfing in previous flights that everyone does sitting back there and there’s no simulator or centrifugal that can come that close to the real thing and puling serious ‘G’s’…he panicked and took mask off and barfed again with now my line of sight having whatever he had to eat for last few days staring right at me…yep, that’s when I also barfed right into my mask and had no choice but to leave it on until the freakin’ flight was over!! He never ended-up having the stomach to fly his solo even though he had continued to fly small private piper planes recreationally. A fighter jet is a whole different ball game.
It was nerdy, so thought to share it. Too careful with electronics to have any other such stories luckily.
Not so much of a loss but bad timing. I used to use those MMT-8’s as a full sequencer for this 3 piece pop electro group I was playing in. All our songs were pretty much mapped out on this MMT-8, triggering different synths and even handling prgrm changes and all that. In the middle of the second song at a gig with 800 people watching, the MMT-8 starts to slide off my Wurlitzer and I grab it and the power cable kinda comes out a bit and those crappy MMT-8s wouldnt ya know just wipes the whole thing out. Empty, M Empty-8, pieces of crap. Spent the next 50 minutes doing Jazz Fusion Improv as the venue slowly started to empty. Meh, got rid of those and went straight to an Octatrack. knock on wood the OT has been awesome for me, even got knocked to the ground in the middle of a gig and kept on playing.
woah…that sucks 
sorry to hear that
i usually backup stuff once in a while(meaning once a year/two) but pay a lot of attention in making sure i don’t do things which could potentially be armful or at least i try not to, unless needed…and that’s when i know i’m asking for trouble
as others have said, try and look at the bright side of it: this will ‘force’ you to start fresh and sometimes is good. one will never know when things could go wrong…sometimes when i’m in the middle of something i can hear that voice saying (the one that whispers into one of your ears 
): ‘before you start messing around with stuff, just save it, do it, c’mon, save what you…ooopss, see, i told ya!’ 
and that means, just deleted/overwritten 3-4 hours work (and this still happens once in a while…)
you could also look at this thing in a different way: how many times you’ve actually gone back to what you did 2 years ago? was it really that meaningful? (apart from being a trace of what you did at the time) if you have not been using that stuff, then it means you don’t really need it or it has no value anymore, a bit like thinking of all the stuff we buy and then, after years, we don’t even remember we had it. things do live in their moments and these moments don’t last forever (sorry if this could sound a bit sad to someone…)
It was the late-80’s I was a cad draftsman and new to DOS. Over a few months I drew many projects and all files were named H-1.dwg H-2.dwg H-3.dwg and so on. Upon hearing about this thing called a “backup” I proceeded to copy each project’s drawings onto 360k floppies and then deleting them. After three projects I began to wonder how much these disks held. I typed DIR and there were only three files - and it hit me that they were overwriting - you didn’t get a warning back then.
I came in that weekend and redrew three projects from the final plots on my own time. 
That is a great story. Very human. Very inspiring in a way.
Our old work can get in the way sometimes, can’t it? We can get creatively stuck sifting through our own archives.
Of course, having a good backup system is still a good idea.
Lots of good stories so far! Keep them coming!
As frustrating as it is, it is inspiring. That first year with the Mono was just the warm-up period, I guess. The biggest frustration is that I had a lot of songs I never recorded, in addition to not having a backup saved. Lesson learned.
Got home, started trying to redo the last thing I was working on (FM machines for drums FTW), and got something much better than I had before. I’m thinking about backing up the MD and wiping it out now and starting everything fresh.
Isn’t it funny how many of these stories go this way?
I had exactly the same thing happen when I plugged my Machinedrum MK1 into a MOTU Midi Patchbay AV. I thought I had configured everything correctly, but somehow the machinedrum was looping back to itself.
I pressed start on the machinedrum and it froze, then I turned it back on and it said something like ‘initialising’ and had gone back to factory settings, losing about 32 banks of drums that I had been working on and my entire live sets worth of patterns etc.
Nowadays I don’t let my Elektrons anywhere near my midi patch bay, which is a shame but I don’t want to go through that again!
Now that’s rock and roll right there lol!
This thread reminds me I am due for a backup of my gear…
I don’t really have the kind of horror stories you guys do. But I have lost a few patches mostly from me losing track of what I was doing. Two times were on my Access Virus since it keeps changes available even after you turn it off, the thing is it will clear those changes once you change the patch or multi patch. So here I am working on the same track for days and I completely forgot a patch or two were never saved since every time I turn it on, there they were.
Another time was a beginner mistake on my Blofeld where I thought I was pressing the correct patch save combination and sure enough when I turned it back on the patch was no where to be found. All noob mistakes really.
Hey… guess what I did today?
Fucked up both my monomachines by installing ear racks with too long of screws (provided by eBayer)…
So… while losing songs suck… you could lose your entire unit:
I was once working on the rythm parts of an lp in a studio I had recently been hired to work at. Like two weeks into the job Elektron released a new firmware for the md/uw, just few weeks/months after the uw had been released. I think it was their first joint OS for the two machines. I updated my md and we left to eat something with the studio owner.
We come back, I switch on the md and I read a message on the screen saying something like ‘ram memory something something’ and see a progress bar go from 0 to 100%. The machine locks up. I power off/on and it’s dead.
Apparently there was a bug in the OS that mistook normal mds for uws and erased the internal memory completely, killing the machine. It had to be sent back to Sweden. All work lost and the md didn’t make it back in time to finish the lp.
Lesson learned: don’t be a guinea pig with new OS releases. Let others have their machines killed first.
Yikes