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Hi everyone, so let’s start with the unfortunate news. My dear friend and mentor Steve Evetts lost his recording studio in a fire due to his neighbor’s neglect. Steve has made so many records you probably love with The Cure, The Wonder Years, New Found Glory, Snapcase, Glassjaw, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Misfits, Saves The Day, Senses Fail, Every Time I Die, The Used and countless others. He has a GoFundMe setup, and if you have been moved by his records, as so many of us have, it would go very far if you could help him rebuild right now. 

When I was younger and Steve was mentoring me he was always one of the most thorough and insistent on data back up protocals and making sure to be properly insured. I want to take this incident to talk about a few lessons everyone should take from this incident that I don’t think are taught often enough.

Backing Up Data

There’s a rule with datas in professional circles that if you don’t have two copies of a file it doesn’t exist, since it’s so easy for hard drives to fail, laptops to get stolen, cloud backups to get weird, whatever the issue may be. The rule in professional circles is each song, album cover, photo, music video, piece of footage, sample should exist on two physical hard drives in two different locations and in the cloud. Fires like Steve’s are exactly why this is important, and, the file storage lockers of classic records have burned down, losing music history.

A general rule I have is when a record is done is to back it up and then move it out of my studio. I happen to own a home studio and two professional studios so its very easy for me to put drives in different locations. While it can annoy musicians and producers, many professional record labels demand you mail them a backup hard drive before you are paid for this very reason. If you colaborate with someone swapping backups or sending a dropbox transfer of daily work can really save work. I master tons of songs that were never full finished before they were lost to data failure.

But backing up data can be annoying on a daily basis. As I enter my 27th year of doing it I am grateful there’s tools that are affordable today to do it like Backblaze which I have set to backup all my data every night at 2 AM since by then I am usually not using the Internet heavily. Its easy to setup and affordable depending how much data you are backing up regularly.

For long-term storage, cloud backups can be expensive. This is why I keep SATA drives with hot-swap bays and simply move the data between two locations regularly. I have seen a lot of concerns about whether services like Dropbox are really ready for the vulnerabilities of AI hacks, and I have my doubts that these careless people are careful, so I really like having two physical copies in two locations at minimum once a project is finished.

Enjoying this? Forward it to a music friend you’d like to be closer to and start a discussion!

Insurance

Insurance is one of the most determinative forces in our society and while many of us have it we have no idea if it will actually pay out if tragedy strikes. If you are through a publisher like BMI & ASCAP, they have ongoing relationships with insurance companies that cater to touring and studio-based musicians. For home insurance and more simple things, Lemonade is very reputable for paying out, and I pay a very reasonable rate per month for coverage of my home studio with lots of expensive gear.

But back to Steve for a second. While Steve had insurance, what his GoFundMe is raising money for does not cover the insane costs of getting a new space for his recording studio and the often 6-figure costs of building a professional facility like he previously owned. You can hear stories of setting some people up for life, but more often than not, big pieces of your life won’t be covered by insurance. It’s really important to get your insurance policy explained to you, including any holes in it.

Insurance mostly helps mitigate the damage a tragedy makes in your life but more often than not the time and stress it takes to rebuild it a detrimental setback that id hard to recover from. Steve has made a life creating hundreds of records that have shaped people's lives, and I am hoping enough people will donate to his fundraiser, it is less hard on him than it has to be. Our community is thankfully a supportive one and I am confident he will be back on his feet with a little help, but I want you to also learn the lessons that will help get him to a better place.