Can you move Pro Tools sessions to another drive in bulk?

[weezerboy]

-I need to move 200+ sessions to another drive.
-Normally I'd open the session and choose "Save Session Copy In" but with this many sessions it's very time consuming.
-Due to a bug I was encountering in PT11 on Windows, I had to uncheck "Copy Files on Import", so I most likely have files scattered across drives.

Is there any way to bulk-copy these sessions to another drive without losing audio and video files?

Thanks!

[albee1952]

Its as easy as drag&drop, but(and its a great big BUT), you need to be absolutely positive that each and every session has 100% of its audio files inside its own audio Files folder. What I would do(at first thought, anyway) is COPY all the sessions to the other drive and then open(from the new drive) several sessions and make sure they load without any missing audio files(how many depends on A-how much time you have to spare, and B-if any open and report missing audio files). Once you are satisfied that all the copied versions are good, only then would I delete the originals

[weezerboy]

Originally Posted by albee1952

Its as easy as drag&drop, but(and its a great big BUT), you need to be absolutely positive that each and every session has 100% of its audio files inside its own audio Files folder.

Definitely NOT sure of this. In fact, I'm fairly certain that they are NOT all in the audio files folder. Same with the videos, I'm not confident they're all in their projects' folder. I usually set the session to copy all files on import, but there was an import bug in Pro Tools and the only solution was to uncheck this box. I'm wondering if there is any sort of tool designed to handle this? It sounds like the answer is No.

[mjslakeridge]

If you have audio files for a session spread across different sessions or drives, I wouldn't risk relying on a bulk copy to achieve what you are trying to achieve. I would take the time to save session copy. I don't know what import bug you are referring to, having not heard any mention of it here before.

[albee1952]

Sadly, "Save Session Copy" is going to be the only route

[Darryl Ramm]

sounds like a job for applescript if you want to reduce some of the effort of manually finding sessions and then doing save session copy in.


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[The Weed]

If all the audio files are on the same drive, would cloning the drive work?

[DonaldM]

Originally Posted by mjslakeridge

If you have audio files for a session spread across different sessions or drives, I wouldn't risk relying on a bulk copy to achieve what you are trying to achieve. I would take the time to save session copy. I don't know what import bug you are referring to, having not heard any mention of it here before.

This is one aspect of PT I've never understood or liked. I wish it was the default that ALL session files for any session are in that session's folder regardless. I'd rather have a pop-up asking me if I wan to place all the files with the session in the folder or something like that. The "Save Copy In" option can be time consuming if you want to copy multiple sessions.

Also, things get complicated if you want to delete some sessions, as you might delete audio attached to some other session without realizing it.

[mjslakeridge]

Exactly! I was doing some "clean up" on a session, deleting unused files for that session, not realizing at the time that the audio files that were imported into a different session were still only residing in the first session, so once they were gone, they were gone. Now that I think I understand the import audio function, I have not repeated that mistake.

Luckily, the second session had already been mixed down so I have the final song, but have no ability to make any further changes, short of re-recording the missing tracks. I do have a pretty good backup strategy, but in that one case I still lost several audio files, probably because after doing the clean up, I backed up over the session with the files that were deleted during the clean up.

[DonaldM]

Originally Posted by mjslakeridge

Exactly! I was doing some "clean up" on a session, deleting unused files for that session, not realizing at the time that the audio files that were imported into a different session were still only residing in the first session, so once they were gone, they were gone. Now that I think I understand the import audio function, I have not repeated that mistake.

Luckily, the second session had already been mixed down so I have the final song, but have no ability to make any further changes, short of re-recording the missing tracks. I do have a pretty good backup strategy, but in that one case I still lost several audio files, probably because after doing the clean up, I backed up over the session with the files that were deleted during the clean up.

That's exactly the problem. I really don't get the PT file management scheme. I don't know of any other program that scatters data associated with a specific project the way PT does. I hope a future upgrade addresses this to make it possible to port audio files into whatever session folder the user wants.


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