Lost everything even though I saved session

[deardaddy]

Hi,


Stange thing here.
Did a voice over recording session a few days ago.
Came back today to do the edit and everything is gone, no more audio files, no more session files backups, just the session I created before the artist came in the studio.
As I am a command + S maniac, I saved dozens of times while recording.
After quitting the session, I did a backup on two destinations using a well known software.
Main drive and backup destinations have the same content ... nothing.

To be honest, I am pretty scared as I am working on a TV series with tight schedules, I'm afraid this will happen on that project and losing everything.

Any thoughts ?

Thanks for your time.

Best regards,


Pascal

[Darryl Ramm]

Unclear what backup software you are using, but it likely won't matter as the audio fairies don't go to multiple different drives deleting files. Hopefully you backed up to drives that are removed from the system after the backup, but again not that may matter here.

The bottom line with mysteries like this is it will be something you did wrong, since we don't know what you did folks here cannot really help guess that. The main thing is you realizing it's almost certainly something you did, not a bug in Pro Tools or the Mac, and then trying to work that out.

A common cause for behavior like this is unintentionally saving the session to a removable drive (maybe a backup drive, or transfer drive, or even USB stick). Easy to do if Pro Tools was previously used to open a session on one of those drives. Mount all possibly drives that could have been connected and use a low level search utility (not Spotlight which might not have indexed the drives) to scan the everything. Like unix find on a mac.

$ find / -iname \*sessionnamefragment\* -print

And for advanced bonus points make sure the session was not saved to a directory where you thought a drive should be mounted but was not, and now you have a drive mounted on that directory... your session will be hidden below the mount. Unmount/eject all drives (except the root drive obviously) and look in those mount directories.

[deardaddy]

Hi Darryl,



Thanks for your reply.

I really can't explain what happened.
I don't see what I did wrong.
I worked on the audio SSD.
No drives were attached while I was working.
I did the backup at the end of the day on drives which were not connected during the day.
The ptx file I created before the artist came has not been deleted and is present on the audio drive but all the recorded files have been deleted.

I guess this is one of those things which will never be explained.


Best regards,


Pascal

[gives]

Originally Posted by deardaddy

Hi,


Stange thing here.
Did a voice over recording session a few days ago.
Came back today to do the edit and everything is gone, no more audio files, no more session files backups, just the session I created before the artist came in the studio.
As I am a command + S maniac, I saved dozens of times while recording.
After quitting the session, I did a backup on two destinations using a well known software.
Main drive and backup destinations have the same content ... nothing.

To be honest, I am pretty scared as I am working on a TV series with tight schedules, I'm afraid this will happen on that project and losing everything.

Any thoughts ?

Thanks for your time.

Best regards,


Pascal

Why not just drag an actual copy to another SSD or another HD. I just finished a month long series a couple of months ago and always have an Samsung SSD, or whatever to backup my projects. I find that if I do that it is so easy to just copy the files. THEN I check all of the directories at the end of the day to make sure everything copied over fine. Simple-:). Question: Do you also use auto-backup session? I use it and set it to the maximum 999 max backups and save every 2 minutes. Here is an article about BU on Protools Expert:https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/hom...-part-8-backup
It may be overkill, but not for me and my colleagues, especially if as you say you are on a TV series. There are also drive configs that mirror the entire drive you are on simultaneously, but I find I have never needed that.
BTW. Checked out your site, but there is nothing there but a homepage. No links to anything about you, your studio, or projects you have done. Hmm..
Good luck!
G

[Rich Breen]

Originally Posted by deardaddy

...I guess this is one of those things which will never be explained...

Open the session and look at the relink window, or opt-O to the session browser - it'll tell you where the offline files *were* when you recorded.

[gives]

Originally Posted by Rich Breen

Open the session and look at the relink window, or opt-O to the session browser - it'll tell you where the offline files *were* when you recorded.

Yes, Good point Rich-:)

[deardaddy]

Hi All,



Thanks for your replies.

In fact, I created the session at 9AM, the artist came later than expected so we started the recording at 11AM. I saved during the recording lots of time.
The only ptx file which still exists is the one I created at 9AM before we start the recording, nothing else.
No backup session file available after the one just after 9 AM.
When I open the 9AM file, there's no audio file and no link to any audio file as at that moment, we did not start the recording, so there's no offline file.

What happened just seems impossible.
It is like we did not do the job, everything we did was deleted.

I do a daily backup with a specialised software to two destinations to prevent from a possible audio hard drive failure.

Best regards,


Pascal

[Ale]

Hope you found your files. A week passed now.

Could it be that you accidently mounted a network volume?
Lets say a volume from another station.
If the volume has the same name it could happen that protools saves everything on that drive. It is easy to oversee a second volume that has the same name.

I ask you this because this happend to me two times.
I came back the other day and found the project folder with zero changes.
But I found all files on the other station...

In my case it was user error. My backup solution chronocync was misconfiguered so it mounted drives from other rooms on my machine.

CarbonCopyCloner could also mount drives when it is running. Those drives are hidden but sometimes protools sees those hidden drives. I was able to record to them. I suspect it was in this case a Protools/OSX error.

Ale

[JFreak]

Best session backup system ever is built in to PT itself. Once you are done, Save Copy In to another drive.

[deardaddy]

Hi,

Sorry, I did not come back earlier, I was super busy with one of those big projects.

Nothing reappeared even though I mounted my backup network drive.
I hired the actor to come back to re-record what was lost.

In fact, the strange thing in what happened to me is that the original 9AM session was not deleted but all the other sessions I saved during the 2 hours recording time completely disappeared as well as all the audio files which were recorded (and the session backups too).

I recorded on my audio SSD.

Now, I'm backing my work manually (using Forklift), I double check what is going to be copied before and then approve the copy.

Thanks for your time.


Pascal