#so embarrassing time to switch to samsung ig

[cryiling]

i finally got an ipad to draw with!!!! so i decided to draw ronan for this trend i saw on insta (altho i don't actually post on insta anymore 💀) sadly once again this is not really how i imagine ronan, oopsies. i'm gonna keep drawing him until i finally get it right LOL

[definitionmusic]

ILL COMMUNICATION: ‘BACK THAT ASS UP’ BY ILL POETIC

Full Column HERE or keep reading:

When it all falls down...

Ever had your computer crash? It sucks. You know this already. Late one February evening during a conference call, my laptop froze up. After a couple false restarts I quickly realized this was deeper than a typical freeze-up. A few Google searches and BIOS tests later, I’d confirmed a crashed hard drive. For 7 years my laptop ran smooth as I could ever hope and in the blink of an eye he was down. Wouldn’t be the end of the world except I had roughly six months of naked-as-hell files on there completely unprotected: some deeply personal (recent family memories), most creative and professional (lots of beats, full album mixes and such). Yes, I should’ve had them automatically backing up, but my external was full and believe it or not my new external was in an Amazon shopping cart awaiting purchase later that week.

Per advice from my wife, I went through a host of local businesses to both rebuild my laptop and recover my data and I’m thankful I did. Though it all cost me more time and money than I’d hoped, my files have since all been recovered and reorganized and my laptop has been rebuilt stronger than ever. Yay for me. But I’m not writing this for me, I’m writing this to pull some lessons and tips I learned along the way that may be of value to you, the content-creating, laptop-owning, external-drive-needing creative on the other end of this screen. So here goes:

Tip 1: Revamp your setup with SSD Hard Drives

I’ve known I needed to do this for a while but it took a full-on crash to finally make the switch from a standard and less reliable spin drive. I went with the Samsung 860 Evo SSD , recommended to me buy my repairman Darrell (highly recommended if your in the San Diego area). My laptop is now taking advantage of both hard drive spaces and I am taking advantage of how best to use these workhorse SSD drives.

Tip 2: Use one SSD Drive strictly for running programs, Use the other for active files

As with the first tip, you can find this advice in a ton of PCMag articles I’m sure, but as it relates to artists and (ughh) “content-creators”, this is important for us. SSD drives are built to carry heavy loads. Anybody working with large studio sessions, productions or video content needs all the hard drive space available. Splitting your programs onto one SSD drive and your active files onto the other allows the primary drive to perform at its highest quality with no impedance from the large files you’re working with. I noticed the difference instantly.

Tip 3: Cloak your second SSD drive in the cloud.

Again, none of these tips are innovative. We all work on the cloud. Many of us use SSD drives and may even split how we use them. I’m interested in exploring how all of these ideas work with each other. So after reserving a single hard drive strictly for your active projects and sessions, I recommend purchasing a $10/mo 1TB Dropbox account (or something to that effect). In doing this I’ve essentially cloaked my entire SSD drive inside of my Dropbox account. This means that every file, session, template, plug-in or instrument that I find myself pulling from is constantly updated in real time and accessible no matter where I go. My entire laptop is essentially on a private (using the term relatively) cloud.

Tip 4: Back-Up and Double-Up

As projects continue to outgrow that initial SSD drive (which they will, quicker than you’d like to imagine), automate daily or weekly backups to a large-scale external drive (as many TB as you’d like). I myself now have two external drives (a 2TB WD MyBook and a 4TB WD Passport) actively backing up my cloud-based SSD drive and my 4TB is updating into it'sOWN cloud because I never, ever, ever, ever want to have to go through the shit I’ve gone through these past few months

If you’ve never gone through a catastrophic hard drive crash, this may all seem par for the course, but if your income-therefore-survival depends on the content you create and service (mine does!), then you know how much this shit matters. There’s nothing more embarrassing as a professional in any field than having to tell a client you’ve lost their work. There’s nothing more heartbreaking than losing your own work, the shit you’ve no doubt put countless hours into, knowing you’ll never be able to recreate the stream of creative epiphanies it took to produce it all in the first place. There’s really no excuse you can give them or yourself to justify what went wrong. As I said at the beginning of this piece, the shit sucks.

I’ll close with one final tip, as I’ve had a long time to think about this clusterfuck while backing up terabytes of files these past few weeks:

Tip 5: Give yourself the time to organize files, and price your services with this in mind.

Nobody at a professional level in their field just ‘doesn’t back files up’. It’s typically something that gets put on an ever-growing to-do list and slowly bumped to the bottom as new work comes in. And it remains near the bottom, something you swear you’ll get to once you wrap up this project that your head is so deep into. It’s boring as fuck and it feels like you’re wasting time that could be spent making music, money or spending time with friends and family. You know, being happy and such. But as a self-employed or semi-self-employed artist, producer or engineer, it’s our job to etch out time for these basic maintenance issues. Accounting for things like this gives a better understanding of where our time really goes and to value our worth in accordance. Next time you offer a price for your production or mixing services, really think about all of the steps involved, not just the creative ones. 

My name is Timothy "Ill Poetic" Gmeiner. I am an artist and producer residing in San Diego, CA. I’m currently back in school as a full-time student of music to sharpen skills and further education in my craft.

This past year, under mentorship of my department head, I developed a full college-level curriculum on artist & producer entrepreneurship and self-employment. I toured it out through various university lecture circuits.

This summer, along with a host of Midwest festival dates, I’ll be offering this curriculum as a series of entrepreneur workshops for those interested in taking their own journey. Dates will announce soon. Sign up on my mailing list HERE if you'd like me to keep you updated.

You can learn more about me via my website, IG, Bandcamp or yourfavorite streaming platform.

My most recent album “An Idiot’s Guide to Anarchy” is available on all streaming platforms as well as vinyl.

The sky is falling.