Tracking the evolution of the deformational energy budget within accretionary systems provides insight into the driving mechanisms that control fault development. To quantify the impact of these mechanisms on overall system efficiency, we estimate energy budget components as the first thrust fault pair develops in dry-sand accretion analogue experiments.This data set includes photos taken and forces measured in four experiments performed at Université de Cergy-Pontoise in October-November 2016. The experiments are described in McBeck et al. (submitted).The data are organized into 5 main folders, with the following contents:1) E373_photos: Contains 3 subfolders: droit_RDY, gauche_RDY, haut_RDY. Each subfolder contains images taken at 1 second intervals throughout experiment. droit_RDY, gauche_RDY, and haut_RDY contain photos of the right, left, and top of the sandpack.2) E374_photos: Same organization and contents of folder E373_photos3) E375_photos: Same organization and contents of folder E373_photos4) E376_photos: Same organization and contents of folder E373_photos5) forces: Contains text files that list the normal force against the backwall (N) and total applied normal displacement to the backwall (mm) in the second and first columns, respectively. The filename indicates which experiment the text file describes.