Picture this: You’re jolted awake in the middle of the night and find yourself curled up in a tiny swaying bunk. You peer over the edge and there, shattered on the floor, is a precious hard drive containing irreplaceable video footage that you shot over the previous week.

Mark C. Eshleman, creative director and videographer for the band Twenty One Pilots, was regularly plagued by that exact “weird crazy nightmare back in the days” — five or six years ago — when the alternative hip hop duo was just getting started.

“I would see the hard drive just shattered on the ground because I turned the wrong way and it fell and I just wasn’t able to grab it,” recalls Eshleman, 27, who has been documenting the Columbus, Ohio, band almost since its founding in 2009.

The dreams apparently were summoned from his subconscious by the fact that he would literally sleep with his hard drives — either packed into a case at his feet or sometimes with an individual drive “right up against my face and against the wall and kind of protected” — because he was worried they’d be damaged in the cargo hold of the band’s bus.

Eshleman is sleeping better these days, partly due to the cresting popularity of Twenty One Pilots — aka Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun — but also because he now has his footage saved on Western Digital storage and backup drives that he is confident can stand up to the rigors of the road.

“The easiest way to not worry about something is to make it so you don’t have to worry about it,” he says of the WD My Passport for Mac and WD My Book Pro with twin WD Black internal drives that now form the backbone of his mobile office.

Eshleman, who is also founder of the video production company Reel Bear Media, gathers massive amounts of video — typically 8 to 10 terabytes of data — during the band’s tours, which have crossed the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia.

“One of the most important things I’ve learned with doing this style of content is that you can never shoot too much footage,” he says.

Eshleman is a blur during the tours. He might be filming: interviewing fans outside venues, capturing Joseph and Dun’s impressions as they prepare for a show or shooting the concerts. And if he’s not shooting, he’s editing footage so he can quickly turn around videos and post them on YouTube for the band’s growing legion of fans. That process may occur in the front lounge on the bus — “basically just a couch that’s moving at 55 mph” — in airports, on flights, or at a folding table once they arrive at a venue.