Weird protools 8 issue with hard drives

[MX582]

Hi all,
So we did a session the other day on our internal drive in our mac pro running pro tools 8 and some how it saved all but a few of the audio files created during that session into a separate external hard drive that was hooked up to the computer. It created a session folder in that external drive with the session name but the only thing that was in it was the audio files folder with just the new files we recorded. I'm completely puzzled how this would happen. We didn't have round robin allocation set or anything like that as far as i know...

[DigiTechSupt]

Were you using a template or a previously created session that would have used the other drives folder for it's audio?

[johnnyv]

Digi, we just had the same issue. Here's our situation:

Brand new Harpertown 8-core, fresh internal drive, fresh Leopard install, fresh PT8 install.

A client brought us a session from another city, we copied that session in its entirety onto our hard drive. It was a 7.4.x session, which we opened in PT8. We worked on the song for several hours.

When we finished the session, we put a full copy back onto another hard drive owned by the client. When he got home, he said that many of the audio files were missing. We went into the audio folder on our drive, and many of the files were there (roughly half). We could open the session fine, and we could see all the files, but WHERE WERE THEY? We found them on another hard drive hooked to our computer...just as the guy described above. On that drive, there was a folder with the session name, and inside of that, there was a single "Audio Files" folder which contained JUST THE MISSING FILES. So, IN THE MIDDLE OF A SESSION, for some reason, the location of our recorded files started to be stored on another hard drive! I was totally stumped.

Any thoughts?

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Just a heads up - never copy sessions with the Finder when sending out a copy for a client on their drive.. Use Save Copy In... and select to copy all the audio files.

Rail

[Howardk]

Originally Posted by Rail Jon Rogut

Just a heads up - never copy sessions with the Finder when sending out a copy for a client on their drive.. Use Save Copy In... and select to copy all the audio files.

Rail

You can't go wrong if you follow Rail's advice on this. . . and by the same token, anything someone brings in on a transfer hard drive, open it on the drive, and use Save Copy In to copy it over to your work drive. THere are other ways to do this, safely, but this is simplest.

[johnnyv]

Originally Posted by Rail Jon Rogut

Just a heads up - never copy sessions with the Finder when sending out a copy for a client on their drive.. Use Save Copy In... and select to copy all the audio files.

Rail

Yes, that is advice well taken. From now on, that's what we'll do.

---However---

I can also imagine us keeping backups for clients, and it's troubling to know that PT is somehow switching up hard drive locations without anyone's knowledge, so we should definitely get this sorted out. We also had no round robin allocation selected.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Make sure the drive in the Workspace was a "Record" drive.

Rail

[johnnyv]

Well, that's the weird thing, Rail. Half the audio files went where they should go...in the Audio Files folder in the ProTools Session Folder. The other files ended up on some random drive we have attached to our system; a drive having absolutely nothing to do with the session, PT8, the client's files, etc. And this all happened within the span of one recording session over the course of about 8 hours. Totally weird.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Can you open the session and check the disk allocation for the tracks which went to the wrong drive?

Rail

[DigiTechSupt]

And did you possibly have 'Round Robin' enabled in the Disk Allocation window?