Catastrophic Audio Files Loss

[Darryl Ramm]

You likely did not create the location of the "wrong" audio folder in Pro Tools. That location was the "correct" place at some time and as you described you copied session folder using the finder. Each time you copied that they keep pointing the content location back at where it was in the original session. If that seems to be a totally strange place it may have been somewhere a session was originally created and then you removed all but the session files, or it may have been you imported content into a session at some point but did so by not copying it. Again as many folks here have pointed out, you did most of your damage, by copying sessions using the Finder.

You can try this as well. Create a session with media outside the session folder and try different things copying and moving that session folder in the finder. Then look at what is going on in Pro Tools.

Pro Tools has to support all kinds of more complex media content/location capabilities than low-end DAW systems given the hugely complex sessions and media storage it has to support. There are ways that Pro Tools could detect suspect things done in the finder, maybe they should be implemented and throw up warnings, but they'll also cause error messages/warnings and possibly even more confusion if not really well done.

There are whole lots of types of user friendly errors/warning that Pro Tools could do better and often does not even try. I wish Avid would scrub through the product and look at implementing more of those.