please help... a certain #*&*! is deleting my PT sessions

[witt]

If anyone can help..... I'm working freelance at a studio on an NT ProTools system.. There are several engineers that also work on the same system, so there is some competition for clients... To make a long story short, there is one engineer in particular that I believe has it out for me. Thus 4 gig worth of my audio media has turned up deleted. I tried recovering the data with Final Data NT, and was able to successfully retrieve the files.. But only a small portion of them would read as .wav files. The rest were (I assume) corrupt

Anyway, what I need is a program that would show a date and time when the files were deleted. This would clearly show who the jerk is that deleted the files (as we all work different shifts that are documented via the studio schedule)

Does anyone know of such a program? Or.. does anyone know of a program that might do a better job at recovering .wav files? The drive has been taken off of the system and I am going to try again to recover the files this Thursday.

Any help would be so very much appreciated.

[Allen Hallada]

YOu may want to try Norton Rescue or Norton Ghost. I think that Ghost only works when it is previously installed. Good place to start and you may want to call them.
Allen

[steve at Your Heaven]

I can't add to the advice about what to do with the drive you are working on. I have a separate thought about dealing with this problem, which is to back up and take files with you. At this point, an external 80 GIG firewire drive is under $300. (not fast enough to run Protools on, but very quick for backing up stuff). It is sad if there really is someone purposely destroying files, but backing up on a separate drive is a sort of a fact of life, and should probably be part of the service you offer a customer. You should be paid for that service for the time and cost it takes to back up, and any customer that turns down that service should assume the responsibility for the [sadly] fairly common loss of data that occurs with these wonderful but complicated-and-error-prone machines.

[tonygoodall]

Nothing will replace the safety of having your own backup, but failing that:

Try setting the Audit policies to track file access.
Don't you have different user names? that could help.

NTFS is even better:
Certainly with an NTFS drive you can audit deleting. (Or block all access by username)

I assume you can't lay the law down in this studio or take away files

I would guess that most users wouldn't know about auditing, so you could put this in place without raising suspicion

Since this is a generic file-protection issue, you might be better off looking on usenet or google for more info.

I'm sure there are other ways, but you shouldn't have to go too deep

cheers
tone