Thomas Dolby On Having Backups

[Moozik: Simple Minds - This Earth That You Walk Upon]

Thomas Dolby didn't exactly have a good experience of airport security on his latest tour.

my gear arrived at Logan Airport by cargo plane. Evidently some security official wanted to look inside the cases. My main Mac G5 computer had been opened up, the hard drives pulled out of their bays, and multipin connectors stuffed back on clumsily, breaking the pins. This meant the computer would not start up at all. A certified Mac genius spent 15 hours trying to get it back, but was only able to retrieve about 40% of the data. I stayed up all night two nights in a row trying to pull the songs back together. As my songs involve many seperate resources like samples, MIDI sequences, hardware patches and preferences etc, almost all of them were irretrievable. And the main backup drive was right there in the Mac and also damaged. I had a second external backup which had older versions of the songs (pre-Horns) but I was still missing many software plugins, preference files and so on.

I'm very embarassed to admit this because it's such old hat. I'm sure you've all had computers go down at one time or another, so you'll you know how hard it is to maintain a thorough backup policy. And yet there's almost a tradition among high-tech performers (viz Todd Rundgren, Howard Jones) for gear failures resulting in cancelled shows or worse. I watch that and think, well it would never happen to me because I will be smart about backups, have two of every piece of kit and so on. But I probably had a false sense of security after nearly 70 gigs in the last 18 months with nothing worse than the odd gremlin.