Session Lost. Need Advice On Data Recovery

[jaminjamesp]

This is a follow up to a post I made about pro tools shutting down when I try to save. Every time I saved, it shut down on me. Finally I was able to save a copy of my session... and this happened...

This may be a long post, but if you have any info on this subject, or have half a heart, please help me... I just lost about 2 weeks of work.

Here's what happened. I'm running PT11. It got really buggy on me, and I was getting nervous for my session. I did a save copy in to my external drive. The same drive that it was originally on. I did this because when it got buggy I took at look at the PT folder to open up a back up, and noticed all the session folders where free floating in my "Current Songs" folder. I don't know how that happened. So I saved the copy. I opened it. It was weird because the copy had to relink files. But it did. So I played it back, saved it, and closed it. I then deleted the original session off the external drive. This was the only session saved on it, it was a new drive. On that 1TB external drive was also a clone of my old system drive, because I recently put in a SSD system drive. All my Komplete Ultimate samples are also saved on that drive. I then went and erased my old 1TB system drive, so I can record to that.

I then go back to open up the saved copy of my session and i get an OS message that says, "the file cannot be opened because the original alias is missing." My audio files are there, so thats a plus. I'm running some data recovery software right now on the external drive. Nothing has been written to it since I trashed that old session, so I'm hoping I can recover it.

I know this is really convoluted. I'm tired and frustrated with PT and was not as cautious as I should have been before trashing folders.

If anyone sees something I'm missing, or can help, that would be awesome. I just lost two weeks of work on a song.

I'm about to open a bottle of whiskey and watch the progress bar on my data recovery. I have about 5 hours left. Oh joy.

[Darryl Ramm]

Ouch. But I cannot follow exactly what you did in exactly what order, e.g. the details with all these drives being shuffled around, the "old" system drive that was was erased. Was that the system drive you had been running just now or a previous one? What became the new system drive?

You had emptied the trash right? Otherwise the files will just be sitting in the trash can. (not meaning to insult your intelligence, but I've seen folks make that mistake).

I could imagine ways you end up losing media/audio if you did a "save session in" not a "save as"? or did not check "save all audio files" in the "items to copy"? But I cannot work out how you end up with the media files but the session files being deleted.

Also had you consolidated media into your session folder previously? You may want to go to Pro Tools Preferences > processing and make sure that "Automatically Copy files on import" is checked.

You've also got to have a backup plan. Something like: Back up session files nightly with time Machine to a network share. If you have that you would have a choice of daily backups to roll back to. Also make complete bootable image copies using Carbon Copy Cloner (*not* Time Machine) to an external USB3, FW800 or Thunderbolt HDD or SSD. You need at least two rotate full image backups to two external drives to make this work safely. Every time you are about to make major changes to the system. Maybe more drives and more frequently depending on needs. They are fully bootable and can have your system running again as fast as it takes to reboot if you have a major disk failure/problem. So go buy an Airport Time capsule or similar for Time Machine under file backups and some external disks for full image/bootable backups.

And make sure you have auto session save is enabled.

[Darryl Ramm]

Oh BTW had you tried to run or been running this external drive as a time machine target? and also had sessions on it? (bad idea).

Here is a little info that may help you on alias recovery. http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=43047

Notice especially the idea to go look for your files using Terminal.app in /Volumes/...

[jaminjamesp]

[QUOTE=Darryl Ramm;2106043]Ouch. But I cannot follow exactly what you did in exactly what order, e.g. the details with all these drives being shuffled around, the "old" system drive that was was erased. Was that the system drive you had been running just now or a previous one? What became the new system drive? [QUOTE=Darryl Ramm;2106043]

Sorry, its super confusing. I'll try and clear it up...

First I had an SSD system drive installed on which were installed os x 10.8.5 and Pro Tools 11.

Second I cloned my old HDD system drive to my external drive. My plan was to reformat the HDD and record to it.

Third I loaded various plugins and synths, and installed Komplete Ultimate on the external drive.

I opened sessions to work on from the external drive, which had the clone on it.

So today I was working on a song. PT11 started crashing on me every time I tried to save. When it crashed I went to the backups to restore the session. Thats when I noticed that the session folder wasn't intact. In the folder that held all my sessions, the audio files folder, fade files, backups, .ptx, etc of that particular session were spread around. I wasn't sure if I could just drag them back into a new folder (I'm still learning a little here) so did save copy in. That copy was saved to external drive.

The only issue was that first few times I tried to save copy in PT crashed. I finally got it to save, after which I opened up the saved copy. It was odd because it had to relink the files... I'm sure I checked all the boxes, because the session took a few minutes to save.

Once all the files were relinked I saved it. A few seconds later it crashed.

This is where I made my mistake. I assumed that after after I saved, it actually saved. Silly me.

I then took the previous session, gathered up the folders that had been spread around, and trashed them. I listened through a couple other sessions, and decided I didn't need them either and trashed them. I write a lot of songs, and some of them just don't make the cut.

Once the drive was clean, I emptied the trash.

I then tried to open the saved copy, but received an os x message that the alias could not be found. I did a quick google search and pretty much realized that wasn't a good thing at all.

So. I don't have any backups of that session. What I should have done is open a new session and see if I could import session data, because it looks like most of the audio files are there.

I'll have to wait to try that, because right now I'm running data recovery software to try and get back what I trashed. From what I've read, because nothing was written to the drive after I emptied the trash, I stand a good chance to get it all back. We'll see. There is about 2 hours left on the software. Then they're gonna charge me 89.00 to buy the software, because the demo only lets you retrieve 1MB. Ha. What a demo.