Is there any worse feeling than losing your creations?

The Lounge General Discussion
#22

I can’t even imagine spending that much time programming a DX7 each and every time you turned it on… I’d feel like I was in Groundhog Day.

Obviously, yes, in the grand scheme of the universe this is pretty insignificant, and I’ve managed to live with my mistake numerous times, but in terms of creative endeavors, I feel like loosing your work forever is a pretty rough one.

I also agree though, probably the worst part is the feeling of defeat afterwards. I didn’t make anything after loosing my work recently, took a few days to get over it honestly. Admittedly this is a hobby more than anything, so making time for it is lower priority for me, but still it did take some time to like, psyche myself up to jump into it again.

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#23

and I thought you had lost your job.
So i guess the answer would be yes +)

#24

Truth be told, that would be a mixed bag; terrible news financially, but I’ve never wanted to leave a job more, so there’s that.

#25

Flip side is realizing old work wasn’t as bad as you remembered and you could have done something with it.

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#26

That is one of the reasons I got rid of the Digitakt. Hard to back up. Octatrack is a better with the disk mode. Back up everything but as has been stated many times, make sure your back ups actually work.

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#27

Truly a horrible feeling… but an even worse feeling is not having done any work with music at all for a period of time, and having the guilt eat and scratch away at you every minute of the day… better to have created and lost versus not having created at all! At least if you create and lose you’ll be able to keep the personal enrichment and value of practice and experience!

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#28

I’d not long finished making my first album back in 2009 - backed up all project files, rendered mixes / master files to an external drive and soon after deleted everything from my computer thinking I wouldn’t need it again. Then one day I tripped over the usb cable and the drive flew across the room.
I haven’t been able to retrieve the files though I keep the disk like a bad memory.
What’s worse is I had also transferred a lot of photos of my newly born son and the first few months of our lives together. Precious moments that I can only imagine now as memory fades.

A back up is nothing unless you have a back up of a back up. If it’s really important to you of course. I’m being serious when I say I was depressed for some months.

Now I store everything on two external disks aswell as on my computer and in the cloud… I don’t care how much it costs - I don’t wanna feel that shit ever again.

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#29

It’s getting more affordable to do that, but it is still pretty expensive and depending on how much data you’re talking about, cost prohibitive to do.

#30

This feels worse.
image

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#31

This is quite the question.

On my OP-1 I had made one of the best patches ever (for me) and I totally just started tweaking stuff and lost my spot.

Took me 5 mins to accidentally make a dope patch took me 3 days and 14 hours to finally somehow find it again.

What a crap feeling…

But now that I record my songs either to an SD card or to my phone (camera/interface) I don’t seem to revisit my past projects.

And even then if I lost it all I guess I would just keep jamming.

To be fair I don’t make money from music so I can imagine the feeling would be significantly worse than the OP-1 patch recreation. Now I kind just treat every jam session as ephemeral. If I save it I save it, if I don’t I don’t…

I guess accidentally reloading a pattern/track/project 50 times a week the first week or so, you kind of learn to be ok with your current idea just being a fart in the wind…:rofl:

To clarify the first 15 seconds of realization that I just lost my work are pretty intense and filled with a lot of different emotions but you get used to it. Not everyone will feel this way but I hope this helps you find some peace moving forward.

Either double back up everything or start to anticipate a wipe event :upside_down_face:

I also work in software and have seen a lot of things get destroyed and jobs be on the line. Eventually you learn to embrace the dumpster fire

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#32

Having a ton of ideas but not the time to realise them :weary:

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#33

Sometimes I wish I got a computer virus that rendered all my ableton projects to wav files, and then deleted all the projects so I could stop noodling around with projects for eons. Could even do without the renders, a forced restart could be a good thing.

That said, stay the fuck away from my computer :grimacing:

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#34

Get very drunk with that exact intent… you can be the virus!

*notrealadvicefolks

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#35

YO I just lost 6 straight hours of work on the octatrack got off work @ 3am got drunk played till 10am without stopping the sequencer. Oh i’ll just turn off that light thinks I and just straight up walks over to the fucking plug and turns everything off at the wall losing all my progress. Ohhhh it’s the start to a great day

#36

I Love Dune.

#37

@ML I think you had it worse than the lot. Glad you weren’t in it!

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#38

I tend to use command line a lot. I was in a hurry, I misstyped and wiped the projects partition. The Time Machine did have some of the projects, but the disk was failing fast (almost every I/O produced bad sectors). It was like I lost a loved one… I managed to recover a third of it, but not the best parts. Now my OS is a VM in a NAS, and it is being triple-end backed up every night along with the projects virtual disk. I still don’t feel this is enough!

#39

Seriously, working or commuting for like 13+ hours a day and having a house to then clean and maintain on your time off puts a serious damper on the whole “jamming on the bleep bloop boxes until the sun comes up” thing that I used to love so much…

Now if I get an hour or two every few days or even week that’s a lot.

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#40

I know right? Between kids/work/life oh and trying to get enough sleep there isn’t much slack!

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#41

I lost a hard drive once, full of art and music. It sucked, but it was a learning experience. Now I back up through time machine. I also keep my project files in my dropbox folder on my computer, and I can access those files anywhere. And when I am long past a project I just move them from my computer, to just dropbox cloud to free up space on my hard drive.

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