Fatal crash = Them ultimate teacher

You might wonder what's up with a topic like that? Don't worry, I'm not writing about anything recent in this post. ^_^

I learned this certain lesson (for how important backups are) the hardest possible way back in the day, 25+ years ago. Before this incident I was carefree computer hippie who thought backup is something only others need while I don't. D'oh. Well, I can only blame myself for the end result ... and the best thing in this brutal lesson was that ever since this incident I've had multiple backups for especially my creative works & hobbies crafted on or through computers of any kind.

This incident, a fatal hard drive crash, happened around May 14th 1999. I wouldn't have the exact date unless ... I didn't unleash my rage about the incident musically, by tracking an extreme metal mod which got finished just some days after the disaster. The music piece is rather average death/thrash metal mod, but its' name tells something about my feelings then; "Struck into ground". Yeah. Somethin more about this tracked metal mod bit later. 

What made the eternal data loss so painful, was that I lost so much ... beginning from the things which were less painful but still certainly painful enough - I lost all my computer graphics, writings, early digital camera pictures from mid1990s to late 1990s and so on ... but especially painful was in this case music, because I lost about 90% of all my tracked metal music creations from 1989 into 1999. 90% of mods from 1989 to 1999 forever gone, ouch! This happened because back then I had my mod archive nowhere else but on the hard drive which crashed (I had two hard drives in my back then PC - yes two, and still I was so carefree that I didn't have copy of mods archive on second hard drive). The 10% I was able to retrieve back to me, well it happened and was possible because 1) I had some mods online (I had been part of "tracked metalscene" since late summer 1998 or so) so I just downloaded all that I could and 2) one really good local friend & classmate of mine had a kind of "best of" compilation of my tracks from 1989 into 1999. 

Of course the tracked mods I lost forever weren't exactly "musical gems" but they were mainly rather primitive, Amiga style creations done when the amount of channels (four) limited severely tracking extreme metal anyway. But it was crushing disaster and it's still kind of a pity as you know, the passing of time, from years into tens of years only emphasizes this: Especially the very early years, 1989-1991, I was tracking rather extreme metal mods and personally I knew no one else doing that back then. What I did, was really primitive and rough, and for example the case of 1989 what I wrote about in earlier post - visiting a musician relative of back then Amiga friend who analysed some of my extreme metal mods (and shocked my friend by saying that it's not crap but it has some genuinely interesting musical patterns going on) ... it would be so neat to be able to revisit tracks from that tracking era tens of years later and analyse them, perhaps even do some sick compilation about them, but ... it will never happen of course, because I lost everything from the early years except some occasional tunes my friend happened to have. Like this only (!) remaining example from 1989 <here>.

It is also kind of weird, that back in 1989-1990 especially (when bands like Napalm Death were my ultimate favorite) I tracked literally extreme metal - and from 1991 onwards up until later 1990s (around 1998) I kind of felt that I simply can't track extreme enough metal in a believable  or enjoyable way. Of course I could as years passed, but it was curious time from tracking point of view, 1989-1990, with only 4 channels in use - naively trying to track as extreme metal as I could. Then I kind of went towards Amiga style heavy rock / metal for years until like said, late 1990s I started to go towards the kind of extremity I enjoyed (and the rest is 'Aeuk' history). :)

Well, what can you say? Backups, never underestimate their value nor meaning. It can mean a world as my case very clearly tells. Ever since that 1999 May hard drive crash I've had multiple backups for anything computer based creative stuff I've done. As for ending of this post, I'll put a picture below - which is a screen capture from the forementioned song "Struck into ground" from 17th May 1999. As was common in tracking mods (no matter the genre) I used to write stories into the mods. Sometimes short comments, sometimes longer story - and it's a longer story in this case, because ... of that hard drive crash, how else. Check it out below (click it to see it bigger). 

PS: Checking out the short greetings list, there are two names "Violator" and "Shukri" (later Forhekset) which went further from just metal tracking since around these times (1999-2000) I joined Shukri's band Cauterized (which was located in South Africa back then) as drums programmer, back then Violator (Richard) was vocalist in the band. Cauterized was another twist to 'Aeuk' story for sure, and quite a long one too, but more about that in some other future post ...

Background story from 'Struck into ground' metalmod by Aeuk