Ableton Forum

My MacBook laptop recently exploded and smoked to its dramatic death. My first though when I saw this was about the hundreds of songs and sketches made over a few years that are now gone that were never backed up. How does someone deal with something like this? My approach was produce huge quantity with the expectation that just a small peak rises beyond the average sea level. I had maybe a handful of songs I was attached to that I’ll never be able to recreate.

That was the last time you ditched backups... That’s the hard way to learn though.

Isn't your harddisk recoverable? I would contact a local expert to see if there is something to save from your old disk.........

dhpetrescu wrote: ↑

Sat Dec 07, 2019 2:10 am

How does someone deal with something like this?

By recognising that ALL hard computers and hard drives will die and investing in decent backup solutions so the loss of a system is not a loss of your irreplaceable data.

Hard lesson to learn but it is so easily avoided yet most people put little to zero thought/effort into it until it is too late. If you can afford a computer (especially a mac) then you can afford at least an external drive and some backup software or something like backblaze to backup to online.

I'd get the HDD out of it and try read it in a reader if it looks like it survived. If not, hopefully you have learned from this and invest into some kind of backup for next time.