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  #1  
Old 05-15-2022, 08:05 PM
aftermid aftermid is offline
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Default Pro Tools Ultimate Not Saving

Hi,
This seems to be an intermitten problem with a session I am doing. About 20 min. into the session Pro Tools won't allow me to save and posts up an error message. I can't do a "Save As" either. I try creating a new session and importing session data from the problem session and then I get one of the two following errors: "Can't open because the session was created on a newer or older version of Pro Tools." which isn't the case.

Sometimes during the session I also get a "can't do a auto Session Back" error.
If I reboot and open the session, it saves fine, but I've lost my previous work. I now have to go to the session back ups folder and look for the newest session and import the latest audio files and reconstruct the tracks I did previous to the best of my memory.

The session is being done on a external 4TB LaCie drive with over 3TB of memory still available. I can't replicate this problem consistently. I've seen other posts on the forum with similar issues, but there from like 2008 or 2010, none give a real solution in the end.

As you know, Pro Tools tech support won't help without their ASC for a fee to help, unlike other softwares tech support departments that want to help their customers. I've actually used ASC for this problem before and they couldn't figure it out. They just gave suggestions for the problem that never really resolved. For the huge amount of money we pay for Pro Tools you'd think someone could answer a phone or email without charging, but I digress.

Don't know how to find out what it the cause of this. I am using a Mac Mid 2012 Pro 3.4 Ghz Quad Core with 12 gigs of ram.

Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
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  #2  
Old 05-15-2022, 08:56 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Pro Tools Ultimate Not Saving

Not much useful info provided.

This only happen on one session? Or happens on more than one? Do you have enough time working with or testing other sessions to know?

What is the first error message Pro Tools posts? Exact text please.

And your exact version of Pro Tools is?

Your exact macOS version is?

Your 4TB LaCie drive is what *exact* model? connected to what exactly on your Mac Pro? (does it use any PCie interface cards for example etc.?). It it a single 4TB drive? or multiple drives? running JBOD or RAID or???

The LaCie drive is formatted with what exact file system?

Pro Tools log files are in ~/Library/Logs/Avid Look at the log file for when there is a failure and see if it says anything interesting.

Is anything showing up in syslog in Console.App around the time there are problems (I expect not but check).

What other troubleshooting have you tried? You should be trying trashing Prefs. And running the session off a different drive. Make sure *all* the assets used by the session are moved with the session. Can you test on the internal drive? (ideally that's an SSD) but maybe with Disk cache configured just large enough (not set to "Normal") to just cache your session (Pro Tools disk cache meter turns green) you likely should see that run OK. Try moving all plugin files out of the plugin folder (plugins get involved when you save a session, so *might* be a suspect here). Tried creating a new admin account and testing from there? See standard troubleshooting under "help us help you" up the top of each DUC web page.

12GB of RAM? Uh. Minimum systems requirements has been 16GB with 32GB recommended for ages now. I would hope Avid support looked at that with you.

Hopefully you have that as 3 x 4GB DIMMs with one DIMM in each of Slot 1, 2 and 3. All identical make/model/part number/timing spec etc.

With such a small amount of memory hopefully you are not running many VIs etc. and you have disk cache turned off (set to "Normal"). I'm surprised you have you not upgraded the system? 3 x 8 GB = 24GB should not be expensive and maxing out memory on an old cheesegrater is the first thing I'd do. (NVMe/PCIe SSD is the next).

What does the memory pressure graph in macOS Activity Monitor, on the memory page show as you are running this Pro Tools session. It should be mostly green.

Last edited by Darryl Ramm; 05-15-2022 at 09:07 PM.
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  #3  
Old 05-18-2022, 09:06 PM
aftermid aftermid is offline
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Default Re: Pro Tools Ultimate Not Saving

Ok,

I'll try to answer as much as I can and troubleshoot some of your suggestions.

This only happen on one session? Or happens on more than one? Do you have enough time working with or testing other sessions to know?

It has happened on other sessions before, but not in a long while. I've tested other sessions on this drive and other drives and they seem to be OK

What is the first error message Pro Tools posts? Exact text please.

Sometimes it will post "Session Back Up Not Available" if this does not pop up, but if I try to save the session it will say: "Session Can't Be Back Up". I don't know it this is the exact phase, but it is pretty close.

And your exact version of Pro Tools is?

2020.1

Your exact macOS version is?

High Sierra

Your 4TB LaCie drive is what *exact* model? connected to what exactly on your Mac Pro? (does it use any PCie interface cards for example etc.?). It it a single 4TB drive? or multiple drives? running JBOD or RAID or???

No RAID. The LaCie Drive is a Mercury connected by a firewire to Mac.
It is a single 4TB external drive. Does not use PCie card. Don't know what is JBOD.


The LaCie drive is formatted with what exact file system?

I'll have to check, but I believe it is NFTS

Pro Tools log files are in ~/Library/Logs/Avid Look at the log file for when there is a failure and see if it says anything interesting.

I'll check

Is anything showing up in syslog in Console.App around the time there are problems (I expect not but check).

No

What other troubleshooting have you tried? You should be trying trashing Prefs. And running the session off a different drive. Make sure *all* the assets used by the session are moved with the session. Can you test on the internal drive? (ideally that's an SSD) but maybe with Disk cache configured just large enough (not set to "Normal") to just cache your session (Pro Tools disk cache meter turns green) you likely should see that run OK. Try moving all plugin files out of the plugin folder (plugins get involved when you save a session, so *might* be a suspect here). Tried creating a new admin account and testing from there? See standard troubleshooting under "help us help you" up the top of each DUC web page.

Trashed preferences. Opened a blank session and tried importing session in question, which immediately pops up the error: "Can't open, session created on an older version of Pro Tools. From what I've seen in other forum posts, this seems to be a standard error post for this problem.

12GB of RAM? Uh. Minimum systems requirements has been 16GB with 32GB recommended for ages now. I would hope Avid support looked at that with you.

Hopefully you have that as 3 x 4GB DIMMs with one DIMM in each of Slot 1, 2 and 3. All identical make/model/part number/timing spec etc.

Actually, I have 4 x 4 GB DIMMs for a total of 16 GBs. I made a mistake when I said it was 12.

With such a small amount of memory hopefully you are not running many VIs etc. and you have disk cache turned off (set to "Normal"). I'm surprised you have you not upgraded the system? 3 x 8 GB = 24GB should not be expensive and maxing out memory on an old cheesegrater is the first thing I'd do. (NVMe/PCIe SSD is the next).

No VIs, just audio tracks. Disk Cache is Normal. I do have an internal 2Gb SSD Drive, but don't usually use for session.

What does the memory pressure graph in macOS Activity Monitor, on the memory page show as you are running this Pro Tools session. It should be mostly green.

Yes, this is mostly green. Since this is an HDX system, a lot of the processing goes to the Pro Tools PCI card, so the system does not use much internal computer memory.
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  #4  
Old 05-18-2022, 10:30 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Pro Tools Ultimate Not Saving

If your file system is NTFS did you install Paragon or other third party NTFS support on the Mac? Otherwise a Mac can't write to NTFS file systems. If an older Mac you'd have HFS+ on the drive. But I want to make sure it's not exFAT. Or say something unusual with HFS+ settings, like ignore case. If it's using third party NTFS support I'd definitely try to copy it over to a HFS+ or APFS drive to test it there,

JBOD means "Just a Bunch of Disks" meaning if there are multiple actual drives inside the LaCie box they all show up a seperate drives not RAID'ed together.

LaCie is a Mercury? I'm not sure there is any such model. But if it's Firewire then it's old, and maybe just time to replace.

Look at those logs, you might get lucky.

There is maybe a more research that it might pay to do to see if others have resolved this after getting the same error messages but sessions on an old spinning HDD on FireWire... I's be replacing that with a SATA SSD or even better a NVMe SSD if you have PCIe slots available.

If your internal SSD is fast enough (if it's using the motherboard SATA connections then it can only run at SATA II speeds) I'd try running some sessions there. You can try bumping up the disk cache to just cahce your session (disk cache meter stays green). But maybe just time to replace that slow HDD anyhow. If there is a free slot PCIe slot (ideally with 8 PCIe lanes or more) I'd be adding in a PCIe to M.2 adapter card and M.2 card, they are often a fantastic upgrade for a Cheesegrater.

Last edited by Darryl Ramm; 05-18-2022 at 10:48 PM.
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  #5  
Old 05-19-2022, 06:38 PM
aftermid aftermid is offline
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Default Re: Pro Tools Ultimate Not Saving

I'll check out your suggestions and recheck the disk formatting to be sure. What I don't get why now? The LaCie drive has always been rock solid, even other sessions on the same drive work fine.
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  #6  
Old 05-19-2022, 06:49 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Pro Tools Ultimate Not Saving

Something changed, I would guess corrupt session or bad plugin,... are the most likely causes. If you have possibly good backups of the session be careful not to overwrite them.
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  #7  
Old 05-21-2022, 09:29 PM
aftermid aftermid is offline
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Default Re: Pro Tools Ultimate Not Saving

Yeah, I am starting to suspect the same thing a corrupt session, since it has happened a few times already. What I have done is gone into the Session Back Folder and opened the most recently saved session. I import the missing audio files and recreate the missing tracks by memory. I then do a Save As.


The curious thing is I can then save for about 20 min or so. If i then walk away for an hour or so, it will not allow me to save, giving me the aforementioned errors.


Don't know why this is happening with this session or why it gives the error that it can't open, because the session was done on an earlier version of Pro Tools. Even so, it should still open.


Don't know what you mean by: "If you have possibly good backups of the session be careful not to overwrite them."


Do you mean if I have another copy on another drive?
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  #8  
Old 05-22-2022, 02:40 PM
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albee1952 albee1952 is online now
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Default Re: Pro Tools Ultimate Not Saving

"If you have possibly good backups of the session be careful not to overwrite them."
Auto-save only keeps the amount of saves as you set in Preferences. So if you have it set to save 10(the default) and save every 5 minutes(the default), after 50 minutes, the next auto-save is going to delete the first of the previous 10.

"I can then save for about 20 min or so. If i then walk away for an hour or so, it will not allow me to save"
2 things on this quote; 1-maybe this is a sign of impending drive failure(it gets warm and stops working), so back up everything to another drive right away(IOW, stop reading this and go back things up....right now). 2-any time you are going to "walk away" for an hour, a meal, whatever; save and close the session(I try to never leave a session open for any length of time). If you're wondering why I say that; there are multiple reasons(1-exactly the problem you describe. 2-the power fails and your computer suddenly gets killed and corrupts the data).

BTW, drives(especially spinners)can fail at any time, regardless of how old they are(I had 2 fail in the first month of use and an SSD failed at 6 months)

Regarding backups; any session that does not exist in at least 3 places is NOT backed up(apologies to Craig Anderton). Copying a session folder works fine, BUT(a great big BUT), make darn sure that you are on top of file management, because its perfectly possible to have a session(in its session folder) to be using audio from another folder or even another drive(so copying that session folder might not include some audio files). The SAFE way to do this is to actually open the session and do a Save Session Copy, and check the box to include audio files. This way, everything gets copied, no matter where the source is.
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  #9  
Old 06-09-2022, 03:37 PM
aftermid aftermid is offline
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Default Re: Pro Tools Ultimate Not Saving

Ok Session was stable for awhile, but now getting the same error message again:

Pro Tools was unable to Auto Backup your session.

If your session is on a read-only drive, you must disable "AutoSave" by unchecking "Enable Session File Auto Backup" (located in the Operations tab of the Pro Tools Preferences dialog) to avoid this error.

(Error was: Invalid argument (22) )


Also, when I click save at some point in the session, get error message that session can't be saved. So I have to close without saving and lose work. Totally frustrating. The drive in question has Read & Write permissions and obviously it does record tracks, until about 20 min into the session you try and save and you get the error. Saving before that usually is fine. Again, intermittent issue, I can't define why it randomly happens on this session.
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  #10  
Old 06-09-2022, 03:40 PM
aftermid aftermid is offline
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Default Re: Pro Tools Ultimate Not Saving

Here's the error I get when I try and save the session:

Could not save as "100 Miles From Nowhere Collaboraion Revised.recovered.recovered" because Invalid argument (22) while opening "fczwYJZQgxmdRWYX".
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