Tracks Lost When Sessions Copied

[emelare]

I'm running an iMac 24 with a Lacie external hard drive connected into the 800 Firewire port on the back of the iMac and a Western Digital hardrive that was connected into the Lacie through the 400 Firewire port. I recorded a session on the Lacie. The session consisted of two acoustic guitar tracks, two electric guitar tracks, a vocal track and a conga track. I saved the session, closed it and opened it up again and everything was fine. I did that a few times. I then opened up the Lacie and dragged the session over to the Western Digital hard drive so it would be copied and saved on that hard drive for a backup. The problem -- when I went back to open the session on Pro Tools, the acoustic guitar tracks were missing from the Lacie hard drive and could not be recovered when Pro Tools asked if it could search for the missing sessions. The acoustic guitar tracks could also not be found on the Western Digital hard drive. I now have plugged the Western Digital directly into the back of the iMac USB 2 port, but don't know if that will make a difference. Thoughts? Thanks, Michael

[Starcrash]

File management. Open the original session. Click Setups>Disk Allocation. Uncheck "Round Robin" box if it's checked. This is what likely caused recorded audio to be distributed among various mounted drives. From this dialog you can also manually change the allocation for each individual track by clicking in the Root Media field and pointing to where you want new audio to live. This is, of course, advice for future use. That being said, there are a couple of ways to "fix" your current situation.

Mount all drives that you had mounted while recording-

•Open Window>Browser or Session Browser in 6.x. The Audio Files folder in the session browser contains all audio files used in the session regardless of what drive they live on. Click on the arrow to expand the folder. The browser is divided into two halfs separated by a grey divider. If you scroll to the right in the right half you can see all of the "path names" for each audio file. Select the files that are living on the wrong drive and choose "Copy and Relink" from the little Toolbox menu at the top left corner. Point to the correct Audio Files folder on the drive where you want them to live. Save session.

•This next option is also a safer way to move sessions across drives rather than dragging the session folder. Open original session. Click File>"Save copy in" and choose from the pulldown menu "Copy from Source Media." Point to the new drive. Save.