Rendered Freeze Files Not Deleted
 

Was doing some disk space management and noticed I have a session with 35 GB of files like:

"Session"/Rendered Files/"TrackName"-FZ.wav
or
"Session"/Rendered Files/"TrackName"-FZ_"#".wav (i.e. multiple versions)

I was experimenting with FREEZE function around 8/2018 and I think I was on Protools 2018.8? I've switched to using COMMIT instead of FREEZE. On Protools 2018.10 now (but maybe haven't opened this session since was on 2018.8).

From discussion in thread:
http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t...t=Freeze+Files
it sounds like these are freeze files that are supposed to get deleted when a track is unfrozen and the session is closed.

1) Is there still a bug that is leaving these hanging around?
2) Can I delete them given I'm not using FREEZE anywhere in this session?

Re: Rendered Freeze Files Not Deleted
 

Hmm I'm not sure this is a bug really. If you save a session with the frozen files, then unfreeze, save a new session....if you want to go back a stage and open up the previous session, the frozen files will be missing.

This used to drive me crackers with the rendered files for Elastic which were deleted and meant it was incredibly tedious if you wanted to back a stage or two, watching the computer having to re-render 250+ (sometimes more) files all over again. I haven't had this problem for a while now so I'm assuming the files aren't deleted anymore...which in my book is definitely a good thing!

Also, I'm all for efficient use of disk space, but I don't think deleting frozen files will free up that much space will it? (Compared to say, a video that's running in tandem with the track...)

Re: Rendered Freeze Files Not Deleted
 

Yeah, I understand the reverting back to a prior version issue.

However, I've probably got 10 copies of the session now behind the current version (and I haven't been freezing for a while). So I don't think I will ever backup to the point where the FZ files are needed. And if I did, I would just regenerate them. Freeze is much slower than commit which is why I stopped using it - not to mention pro tools occassionally got confused and thought it had lost some FZ files which meant I had to regenerate them all anyway. Right now I mix a group of tracks for a section of a song, commit them to a Aux track, and disable the underlying tracks so they free up resource. I haven't tried elastic yet so I'm not sure how that would go from a workflow standpoint.

And so I have 35 GB of freeze files sitting there. I backup to disk once a month. My backup image is about 300 GB. I have maybe 10 backups on my backup drives. So maybe I've got 10 copies of the 35 GB that I'm never going to go back to. It's probably not the biggest deal that I'm wasting 10% of my backup disk on this for this one session. It does take some amount of time to copy that each month though.

I do think it would get to be a problem when I have a lot of archived sessions that are backed up and each session has maybe that much wasted space. I think at the point I'm "done" working on a session, I'd want to get rid of most of my old Session Copy files, Freeze files, and bounces before I pack it up for future generations. Elastic might be a different story. This session might be unusual in that I'm just learning how to mix and have made a lot of versions of this session over a long period of time. As I get faster there probably won't 10 Freeze versions of each track (assuming I every go back to using Freeze).

Anyway I assume from your answer that I could delete them and not affect the current version of the session (given there are no frozen tracks).