My computer crashed about before christmas.
I’ve lost all of my musical data, samples, and programs, off of this one major crash.
Im struggling incredibly hard to come back.
Just downloaded Renoise again, and im about to jump back on.
I was wondering if your computer crashed and you lost everything, what would happen to you?
If the hardware is not completely broken: Nearly nothing, except that I need a few hours to recover things, because I am doing backups regularly 
Once this happens to you, you know why the small overhead you have with backups is really worth it!
Do Backups. Now!
It happened to me 8 years ago. I lost any interest in tracking/sequencing again.
But now I’m back to tracking again! 
what you mean by computer crached and you lost all the data? did you try to recover your dada? in a lot of cases its possible to recover broken hard drives. You could try it with special recovery software and if that wount give any results then take it to specialist. its possible to replace all electronics etc on a disc and to de even more interesting things. Yeah, it will cost you some money but in a lot of cases data is more valuable than money 
In the future do your backups like Taktik said
The “important” stuff is always burnt on DVD. Samples etc.
I had several HDD-Crashs but in most cases I was able to recover the data using a bootable Linux-CD and copying the data to another PC.
I still don’t do backups regularly but on the other hand, I am saving some money for a new HDD that I can setup a RAID and some more money for a NAS-Drive.
That’s happened to be before. I lost 90% of my FT2 songs back in the mid 90s… and I was devastated. But it drove me forward… kept me interested. Sometimes these days, I’m tempted to just erase all my unfinished tracks and start from scratch… I’ve got so many short unfinished snippets that I sometimes feel overwhelmed at the amount of work I “must do” to get them all finished 
it was 1999 when my computer’s harddrive had a head-crash which rendered everything on the drive to be void.
“no problem” i thought, as i did have backups on 650MB CD-ROMs of my xm’s that i burned every 3 or 4 months. unfortunately, the most recent backup i made was unreadable, because the disc it was burned on decided to seperate itself from its upper surface at sporadic areas.
so i had to fall back to the backup i made before the last one which gave my motivation to continue tracking a real hit.
i kinda stopped tracking from then on for quite a long time (apart from some excursions in madtracker) and nowadays i know, that frequent backups can really save your ass and the right choice of backup-media is crucial.
the best backup-solution certainly still is the good old streamer tape, because it’s very reliable. most corporate backing-up is solved that way or via RAID mirroring.
unfortunately both solutions are rather expensive (especially good streamer-drives cost a fortune) and CD/DVD backups became unacceptable after that disappointment from 1999 as they’re way too fragile.
so currently i am running monthly backups of my entire system partition, which includes all installed VST/VSTi, my xrns and of course the OS, on a dedicated external 500GB firewire drive which is only turned on once a month for that sole purpose.
those drives (with USB2.0 interface then) can be picked up for less than 100 EUR nowadays, which makes them in my opinion the ideal companion for your backup needs.
concerning your problem Ezylana, i can only wish you a good deal of motivation, because i know how hard it is to recover from such a hit.
good luck mate, my condolence.
You might want to try spinrite to see if spinrite can still do some fixing.
It performs low-level recovering.
Careful though, a RAID does not in any way protect against software malfunction or user error…!
I second that. Yes, HD’s will fail, but so will CD-R’s… and in case of HD’s, you usually notice when either the original or the backup drive dies, so you can get a new one.
Being a bit more constructive:
Actually this happened to me as well several years ago (thats when I started to back up everything). At the end it was a really great thing to be able to start from scratch:
First it forces you to finish songs quickly - just to be able to burn something to an Audio CD or DAT, which is a good thing.
Further you no longer load all these unfinished songs again from which you hoped you could finish them some day.
Also its a great thing to start a new sample library (if you are a sample freak): New samples always enforce new sounds, so instead of reusing all these old samples which are already linked with an idea in your mind, you have no other choice than to do something new and fresh.
As the others said: Good luck with your new start!
2nded.
any Virus > any RAID.
Taktik…
Speaking of backups…
Please tell me the Renoise code is safe!
stupid Oskari
That’s correct, but it is a bit harder to corrupt formatted data-files, but yes virusses are better preserved this way as well.
Though i have a mirror-drive (raid 1) just in case and i backup a lot of database-files there.
I have a spare drive to quickly replace a defective one and when the spare is used, i’ll take care i have another spare within a week as both drives tend to dia out shortly after another.
But what is the real value of all backup material that you have… i have cd’s and DVD’s laying around that i used to backup contents to it and i never layed eyes upon it ever again.
I now and then digg up my old mod archive because someone needs the source of some of my songs but that is practically it. And that stuff i could easily publish online and have a backup in the world.