This dataset is supplementary material to the article of Ritter et al. (2017). In this article, the similarity of fault propagation work in analogue sandbox experiments to natural fault networks is investigated through measurements in a strike-slip sandbox and in a ring-shear-tester. The transient shear strength of the samples is measured for different fault lengths and from this the work is determined. For a detailed description of the procedure and the set-up please see Ritter et al. (2017). The data available in this supplementary publication are:• For the strike-slip experiments three video sequences of the deformation together with the evolution of boundary force for fault lengths of 20 cm, 30 cm and 40 cm. The videos show the curl of the deformation field, determined by Digital Image Correlation of top-view video images. These files are in AVI-format and included in the zip folder 2017-005-Ritter-movies.zip.• A folder containing force vs. displacement measurements for each experiment (2017-005-Ritter-forces.zip). These are 25 ASCII-files that contain two columns of numerical data: the first column is the displacement in meter; the second column is the corresponding force in newton. The files are named according to the following pattern: _.asc• A Matlab script to load the force files and calculate the work. This file is called “plotwork.m” and calls the Matlab function “work.m”, which does the actual calculations. These files have been tested in Matlab version 2012b. The surface deformation data are available upon request.