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  #1  
Old 10-14-2019, 10:52 PM
ramonetl ramonetl is offline
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Default Session Audio files disappeared. Looking for backup software recommendation.

Hey all, I had a project that I was working on that I opened after a month and basically a lot of audio files are missing and it could not locate them. This is odd as I have been running for years and never had this happen. I also noticed on another older session I opened that it was happening but if I closed and then reopened it was back. Its weird **** and I didnt update my macosx or anything else i can really think of. Since this was my initial working session of a new song I was kinda bummed but I have a newer version in a separate project so really I can live without it but I hate not being able to compare my versions and tweak etc. I have not been diligent lately with my time machine as I just redid my entire studio and had not plugged that drive in again. This got me to thinking about computer 101 we all know but get complacent in which is back your **** up all the time. The protools auto backups wont save me on missing audio files and I dont really love time machine. Is there any recommendation of free or low cost softare for MacOSX (Mojave at the moment) that I can use to just backup my working directories to an external drive on a regular basis that is lightweight and simple? I dont want to just start googling and installing random stuff trying to guess what is best and wont infest my mac pro. Thanks. Peter
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  #2  
Old 10-15-2019, 05:03 AM
musicman691 musicman691 is offline
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Default Re: Session Audio files disappeared. Looking for backup software recommendation.

3 words:
Carbon Copy Cloner
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  #3  
Old 10-15-2019, 05:42 AM
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JFreak JFreak is offline
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Default Re: Session Audio files disappeared. Looking for backup software recommendation.

Quote:
Originally Posted by musicman691 View Post
Carbon Copy Cloner
^^ That. And if you keep your computer on 24/7 you can automate it to backup when you sleep. Otherwise need to remember to backup after you stop working. Anyway, best bucks spent for the last decade or so.
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  #4  
Old 10-15-2019, 07:52 AM
Meads Meads is offline
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Default Re: Session Audio files disappeared. Looking for backup software recommendation.

There's also Chronosync for more involved settings.
But for quick'n'easy nothing tops CCC.
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  #5  
Old 10-15-2019, 07:55 AM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Session Audio files disappeared. Looking for backup software recommendation.

You should work out why you are losing content. It might be reasons like content is getting recorded to a drive you do not expect it to be... and backups of where you think it is will not help you. Get your workflow and templates sorted out. Make sure audio content is going into session folders. You can Use “find” to scan all drives looking for audio files outside of session folders.

Carbon Copy Cloner is a fantastic tool for cloning boot/systems drives. It can also be very good for cloning entire audio/session drives, but it may not be the only tool you want to use for that, or may not even be the best, it depends on what you want to do/workflow/recovery needs. Think this through, are you trying to protect against? User mistakes? Drive failure? Computer failure? Theft? Building failure? How exactly will you recover? Just copying sessions to a NAS server or a set of external drives as backup can work *great*. Command line ”cp” command, or just drag and drop, maybe bundling them up with compressed tar or gzip commands to save space, there are lots of great choices with no extra software needed. Disconnect those drives/remove from are when finished to avoid finger mistakes. Don’t rely on auto save giving you rollback ability, save separate copies to the NAS or wherever at key points in time. Time Machine can also be useful for session backup, more useful there than with boot drives. Your sessions are not really backed up until you have about three copies with at least one stored off site. One of those should probably be cloud storage today... not complete cloud backup, just get the session folder and all content copied up to cloud storage like google drive or Dropbox etc... do not run stuff from cloud folders, I would create a compressed tar or gzip file of sessions and copy those to cloud storage. For archives of sessions or key milestones you will likely make more copies and focus on secure/offsite storage and maybe recording onto different hopefully long-usable life media for future playback.

You should test your session backups work, ideally test on a different computer than they came from.
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  #6  
Old 10-15-2019, 03:05 PM
ramonetl ramonetl is offline
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Default Re: Session Audio files disappeared. Looking for backup software recommendation.

Thanks all for the advice.

@Darryl: This is a very strange situation. I generally record my stuff on my internal 1TB SSD and I keep copies on external drives. There is no other place than the directory structure for the files to have gone. Its odd almost like they were deleted and I have had a few hangs where i had to restart but this is odd. It could be file system corruption but that should smoke all the audio files. Its super weird. I am still looking at this and its possible I inadvertently did something but I don't think so. It was a session I saved and then moved on to a new one. That said its not end of world but its a bummer because its the first rendition of a new song and I like to go back and reference what I did during the original composition.

In the case of the other session I could see the clips but it was like they un-linked. When I restarted the files were there but not completely. Totally inconsistent but only in a few sessions. Maybe the session is corrupting. If you recall I had that issue many months ago you commented on with inputs being unavailable and it was only in that specific session. Who knows maybe another avid feature. :)

As for the carbon copy program, I agree that may not be the exact solution but its worth looking at so I am going to install the demo and check it out. I am more interested in features like they have in windows to backup certain directories to an external drive as opposed to cloning a drive. Time machine can work but I dont like how it does this and while I have recovered files in the past, I would rather have the simple point and restore. I do have an external RAID5 TB2 enclosure to store stuff in addition to my Time Machine drive. I just got complacent I think. I keep my mac running 24x7 so something that automatically will backup my session directories only is really what I want. I am not afraid to wipe and rebuild as being an IT guy I believe this is good to do from time to time as systems get slow.

Thanks all for taking the time to give me input. I will check all options listed.
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  #7  
Old 10-15-2019, 04:11 PM
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The Weed The Weed is offline
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Default Re: Session Audio files disappeared. Looking for backup software recommendation.

I'm on Windows and not sure if CCC is only a clone program, but the backup program I use will clone a drive, image a drive (a clone in a file), or just designated files/folders.

Avid used to recommend Super duper for Mac.
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  #8  
Old 10-15-2019, 04:37 PM
musicman691 musicman691 is offline
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Default Re: Session Audio files disappeared. Looking for backup software recommendation.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ramonetl View Post
Thanks all for the advice.

@Darryl: This is a very strange situation. I generally record my stuff on my internal 1TB SSD and I keep copies on external drives. There is no other place than the directory structure for the files to have gone. Its odd almost like they were deleted and I have had a few hangs where i had to restart but this is odd. It could be file system corruption but that should smoke all the audio files. Its super weird. I am still looking at this and its possible I inadvertently did something but I don't think so. It was a session I saved and then moved on to a new one. That said its not end of world but its a bummer because its the first rendition of a new song and I like to go back and reference what I did during the original composition.

In the case of the other session I could see the clips but it was like they un-linked. When I restarted the files were there but not completely. Totally inconsistent but only in a few sessions. Maybe the session is corrupting. If you recall I had that issue many months ago you commented on with inputs being unavailable and it was only in that specific session. Who knows maybe another avid feature. :)

As for the carbon copy program, I agree that may not be the exact solution but its worth looking at so I am going to install the demo and check it out. I am more interested in features like they have in windows to backup certain directories to an external drive as opposed to cloning a drive. Time machine can work but I dont like how it does this and while I have recovered files in the past, I would rather have the simple point and restore. I do have an external RAID5 TB2 enclosure to store stuff in addition to my Time Machine drive. I just got complacent I think. I keep my mac running 24x7 so something that automatically will backup my session directories only is really what I want. I am not afraid to wipe and rebuild as being an IT guy I believe this is good to do from time to time as systems get slow.

Thanks all for taking the time to give me input. I will check all options listed.
You don't have to clone a whole drive with CCC. You just need to read the manual
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  #9  
Old 10-15-2019, 04:49 PM
ramonetl ramonetl is offline
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Default Re: Session Audio files disappeared. Looking for backup software recommendation.

Quote:
Originally Posted by musicman691 View Post
You don't have to clone a whole drive with CCC. You just need to read the manual
I will as I plan to download the demo today. I was mostly replying do daryll's comment. Until I install it and play (and RTFM ) I wont know how it works. But it got two thumbs up so likely it will be good.
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  #10  
Old 10-15-2019, 11:13 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Session Audio files disappeared. Looking for backup software recommendation.

I'm not sure how many folks are comfortable creating tarballs of session folders etc. But here is a simple script
that does that, as an example hopefully that if you want to play with the Terminal command line or write a script
it is not hard.

This very simple script (save the text to a file, then make the file executable with chmod)) takes whatever session
directory you give it and creates a compressed tarball, labeled with the current date/time so you can run this every
time you want to create a backup of a session. This assumes Pro Tools is not running and all the session content is
inside the session folder you provide on the command line (the script could be a lot fancier and check for some of
those possible issues). But I wanted to give the flavor that this can be a very good way to backup individual session
you are working on. And once comfortable with that, adding a script to say the nightly cron jobs can automate this.
automate copying those tarballs to cloud storage, etc.

This does not replace creating bootable clones of the boot drive/system drive, and will not work if session content is
outside the session folder, or may not work in practice practically if sessions have vast amounts of content.
(replace the b*** with bash - vBulletin is one really brain dead piece of junk that is blocking me "special" words).

Code:
#!/bin/b***

if [[ "$#" != '1' ]] ; then
   echo "usage: $(basename "$0") directory"
   echo "$(basename "$0") creates a gzip compressed tar image of the directory, the filename contains the current date/time"
   exit 1
fi

if [[ -d "$1" ]] ; then
   output_file="$1.`date +%y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S`.tar.gz"
   tar --options gzip -cv "$1" > "$output_file"
   echo "Copy $output_file somewhere safe on a different drive"
   echo "To recover that session backup run the command: tar -xvf $output_file"
   echo "You can also view the contents with the command: tar -tf $output_file"
else
   "Creating tar backup failed: $1" is not a directory
fi

Last edited by Darryl Ramm; 10-15-2019 at 11:34 PM.
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