So I was in the midst of working on a remix when all of a sudden the lights went out, as did my monitors.
The laptop carried on thanks to its battery, and the ProTools MBox runs off USB so it was fine. The hard drive, however, shuts off.
Emergency generator-powered lights in the hallway of the rehearsal space go on, and we all start emerging from our rooms in the dim light, milling about and trying to figure out what the Hell happened.
Turns out a couple transformers blew and took out power to the a couple whole blocks. We heard that Hydro would be there soon and it should all be fixed shortly.
While some of my neighbors decided to call it a night and others decided it was a good time to go pick up more beer, I went back to the synth cave – fortunately I have a bunch of LED battery lights for use on stage, so I turned them on and went about unplugging things that I didn’t want to spike when the power came back on.
I had been doing some intricate edits on the remix and hadn’t saved in at least 45 minutes. ProTools seemed frozen, but I had an hour and half of battery life and figured I just might make it for when the power came back on.
I’d been debating taking a pizza break just prior to the outage, and I figured I might as well go pick one up since there wasn’t anything else to do until the power came back.
All in all, I was gone not quite 30 minutes, arriving back to a neighborhood just after dusk with no streetlights in the pissing rain. Funnily enough, I prefer it that way, no hideous orange glows or glares.
I walk back into the dark rehearsal space, find my way back to the synth cave and put the pizza down on the desk. The door is open behind me to take advantage of the emergency hall light as I find my LED lights and turn them on. A minute or so later I notice it’s suddenly brighter behind me and I hear the quiet whirring of my little disco ball rotating again. The power was back.
With that the drive came back to life and I was able to examine the autosave back-ups. It’s on a 10 minute interval, but 10 minutes is a long time when editing. The most recent was at 8:26. Checking my phone for the time of a call I made right after the lights went out [8:29], I realize that might just be exactly before the outage. And thus I was able to restore from that and found I didn’t have to re-do a damn thing.
All’s well that ends well. Especially if it ends with pizza.
Anyway, got the main structure done on the remix, next stop adding in noise and other stuff.
