2 days audio recording lost, session quits closing

[Lee Blaske]

I forgot to mention! the drive seems to be perfectly OK..

Well, it's your data, and your risk. Personally, I wouldn't trust it. Some drives can get intermittently flaky. If it was my rig, I would have retired the drive to some non-critical use. Any use for a new paperweight or doorstop? Drives are really cheap these days. Most cost less than one what we used to pay for only one reel of 2" tape.

At the very least, back up all the data, try to rescue what you lost, and then completely re-initialize the drive before using it again.

Lee Blaske

[crizdee]

Hi,

I've tried Data Rescue 2 and Disk Warrior and still no joy finding these files! I don't know whether they have been deleted or re-named and moved or what, but Tuesday the 28th they were there and playing fine at the end of the day, and next time i opened the seeion on the 4th April, all the vocals recorded on the 28th for this one session have simply vanished.

I think i've found the cause of this session crashing every time i closed it! i had an uninstantiated old version of BFD inserted on a track and either deleting this tracking or closing the session with it in, would make the session quit when closing.

I didn't think having an uninstantiated plugin would have such an effect on the session. and certainly didn't think it would oust all my recorded data for that day?? if that's the possible cause of the lost files.

Chris

[briancometa]

hey chris,

doesn't sound to me like a bad hard drive, especially if you haven't noticed any problems & data rescue didn't find anything. also, the audio was at least recorded at one time, since you were able to play it back. it seems a bit too coincidental for only the vocals you recored on one particular song to disappear (because of a bad hard drive). has this ever happened to anyone before?

i assume that you've already thought of this, but are you sure there wasn't another drive attached to the system that's now been disconnected? even though you checked the disk allocation, is it possible that it automatically changed (and you okayed it w/o thinking twice)? could you check a session backup to see if that's the case?

also, i don't have a rig in front of me now, but i think if you look in the audio files/regions list on the right side of the edit window (with show full disk paths on) does it point to the same empty audio files directory you mentioned previously? (i might be wrong, but you might be able to see full path names in "project browser" if you scroll to the right)... perhaps this will help you find out where the files were recorded. hope this helps, good luck!!

peace
www.briancometa.com

[woodsdenis]

same thing happened to me yesterday,after quiting protols and the usual closing session stuff at the very end "protools has unexpectadely quit" the culprit was xpand strangely.imported into new session and all was fine.didnt lose any audio

[TheHost]

Something similar happened to me...
We've recorded some guitars in a song (31-o3-2006, with the correct disk allocation set and checked. We played out the tracks after recording, so, everything was app)arently recorded with no problems.
At the end of the day, as usual, we made two backups. One of them using the Silverkeeper software, and another backup aopying all the project folder to another Hard disk.
In the other day, When we opened in the next day, the session was if nothing have been recorded. Either the regions were missing, not only the audio files.
We made a search in ALL hd's and no audio recorded on the March 31 was found! The only files found with this creation's date were some fade files and plug-ins settings...

Very strange...

[Jeff Ulmer]

This is beginning to sound like a (much) more serious Digi bug. If the files play back, they were recorded. It sounds like something is erasing them, which (at least under the old systems) just meant they were deleted from the directories. If they have been vaporized, I'd say this is very, very bad.

Perhaps those of you who have had this happen should post your system info, including version numbers.

[crizdee]

Hi,

I'am still scratching my head!! they we're on my hard drive playing fine, 5 days later they have vanished.

Neither Data Rescue 2 or Disk warrior can find a single file! deleted or not deleted, nada

Anyone know a program that can search deeper than Data rescue 2?

Chris

[SteveH44]

I would agree, sounds like a Digi issue. Funny we haven't heard from them. We have 8 PT workstations running here (spec's below), and have seen this problem on at least 2 of the 8 systems. If I'm not mistaken, PT creates a temp record file on the drive
unti the session is saved, then prior to closing of session, sudo finalizes media files and session updates. PT also controls the disk operating structure with its own layer - on top of the HFS structure, which is why recovering data from a PT created files, is almost impossible. It is here that the problem may exsist. This problem though, is not limited to just OSX platforms, but also was seen with SCSI drives on OS 9.x/PT 5.13, so I don't think its an issue with the firewire bridges (we're running Glyph FW400 which are supposed to be immune).
As stated by the other users, we record the files, we playback the files, we close the session, we re-open the session and that's when we'll notice files recorded on a particular day wil be gone, but that in some cases, their regions will still be listed in the region bin, other times not. Attempts to relocate or recover file - unsucessful.
This problem doesn't happen that often, maybe a several times a year for us - across 2 or 3 workstations. So I'm not sure where to go with this - other suggestions !

Steve H
LA Studios Inc.

Spec's: Mac 2.5G DP G5 PPC, 1 gig DDR RAM, Glyph 200 gig 400 FW Drives, OSX 10.3.9, PT 6.91 w/latest cs, Digi 192 I/O's, all rooms identical

[Redmann]

I saw audio files being lost when not clocking properly. How is everyone clocking Pro Tools?

[DigiTechSupt]

There are a few things that I wanted to take a moment to clear up about how Pro Tools operates and, possibly, shed some light on how files may get 'lost'.

Pro Tools does not use any kind of proprietary write to disk. It uses a standard HFS+ disk write direct to the final destination and not to a 'temp' file. The only thing that is changed after a record pass is the header is updated to reflect the actual length of the file and the overview.

Some possible situations where files may get 'lost' :

1. Renaming regions can rename files. If you rename files, but don't save your session, the on-disk session won't find the files, because they're still looking for a file with the original name.

2. Random OS bugs that are not in our control - there have been firewire issues in the past that could still be lingering. A long shot, but possible....

3. User error - not being absolutely sure of where files are located or how disk allocation has been set and/or possibly deleting, moving or renaming files outside of a session or not having the proper drive mounted when opening the session. Not that this is the case here, we just see a lot of this sort of thing happening and always have to consider the possibility.

4. Drive corruption

As for this situation - have you tried looking for all files created within a certain date/time range to see if that leads to anything usable?