Auto Backups are piling up

[OliverH]

Hi, I recently noticed that my auto backups stored in the "Session File Backups" folder in my main parent session folders are totally overly plentiful. By that I mean, I have my preferences set to back up every 5 minutes and to keep the latest 10 backups. But I have hundreds in some cases. I understand that as I incrementally rename/'save as' my sessions as I reach milestones, i.e. "Song Name_ADD VOCALS" or something like that... that the backups would start over with a fresh 10 of them being kept for that newly named session. Pro Tools doesn't know that it's an incremental version of the same song...that makes sense.

However, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the amount of backups on some of my sessions. Sometimes 10, sometimes 12, sometimes 21, sometimes way more. It does always seem to be at least 10 though. Problem is, the backups folder is become really bloated for some of my sessions, one of them nearing almost 1GB of backups... which just seems way overkill.

Sure, I can just delete all of the oldest files and only keep the latest ones... that just seems clumsy though since the whole point of it is that it's an "AUTO" backup.

Anyone else experiencing this? Any solutions or something I'm missing?

[hjorte]

I am seeing the same thing here (Win7, PT HD 11.3.1).

Just now, I changed the default settings from 10/5 to 2/1 (2 backups/1 minute) and created a new session and sat and watched. It worked as configured. I then changed the settings to 4/1. Still worked. Then back to default 10/5. Still works - PT only create 10 revisions and refreshes every 5 minutes (unless the playhead is moving which stops the backup routine alltogether).

Weird indeed. I am now at 8/4 just to have something different from default. Let's see how it goes over the next days.

[OliverH]

Originally Posted by hjorte

I am seeing the same thing here (Win7, PT HD 11.3.1)

Thanks for replying, hjorte. I've had this issue with all versions of PT HD 11 so not sure what's going on. I haven't changed from the default settings to see if it changed anything like you did. Please do let me know if you notice any weird behavior on your end as I'm not sure if this is just a bug or if I'm just not noticing something else that would cause all these extra backups to stick around.

[elicious]

because of the backup folder bloat, a reflex for me,
is as soon as i save a good ver., and close the sesh,
i delete the backups from the song folder.

my pref is set to save 5 copies, one every minute,
so i rarely hit the save button,
knowing i'm never more than 59 seconds away from recovery.

[hjorte]

Originally Posted by elicious

knowing i'm never more than 59 seconds away from recovery.

I don't think PT backs up during play, record, and possibly other operations. So, in theory, hit play and change 100 things during play, PT crashes, changes are lost.

[OliverH]

Originally Posted by elicious

because of the backup folder bloat, a reflex for me,
is as soon as i save a good ver., and close the sesh,
i delete the backups from the song folder.

my pref is set to save 5 copies, one every minute,
so i rarely hit the save button,
knowing i'm never more than 59 seconds away from recovery.

So this happens to you too? The pile up of extraneous backup files, that is...? I think I'd be pretty happy if I could get it to actually only keep 5 files on hand at any given time.

[elicious]

I don't think PT backs up during play, record, and possibly other operations. So, in theory, hit play and change 100 things during play, PT crashes, changes are lost.

tru dat, but as soon you hit the stop button,
it prints a backup pronto,
faster than you could.

and during editing, or punching in, let's say,
there's a lot of stopping the transport.

So this happens to you too? The pile up of extraneous backup files, that is...?

and yes, they do pile up, so as soon as i close, i zap 'em…
e

[Kenny Gioia]

I have mine set to save 30 versions but I also do the "Songname 1.2" method so I wind up with hundreds.

As soon as I back up the song to two drives I just delete that folder on the main drive and keep working. The point of saving "decimal" versions is to always have earlier versions to go back to. Don't really need the backups anymore.

Being that I use Elastic Audio, I can save 4 or 5 gigs with this method.

[OliverH]

Makes sense, thanks for the input Kenny. I guess I'll just get in the habit of ditching the folder, esp as I reach the point of having many "Songname 1.x" versions in my session folder.

[Kenny Gioia]

Originally Posted by OliverH

Makes sense, thanks for the input Kenny. I guess I'll just get in the habit of ditching the folder, esp as I reach the point of having many "Songname 1.x" versions in my session folder.

Yeah. The way I look at it, you only need that folder if you crash.

Anything else, it would make more sense to go back to one of the previous decimal versions.

Good luck.