Lost Data

[Ed Pettersen]

A session created with Pro Tools LE 5.0
and Digi001 asks "where is file click*01".
etc. Only a few of the original audio files
are found but at least a dozen are not. We
have no idea where they went. Using the Find
function on the Mac does not locate them. On
the theory that they could have been accidentally erased we purchased Norton Utilities 5.0 for Mac and looked in the erased files. No files by those names are
found. In the Unerase program from Norton,
we did a custom search using "Nylon-02" (one
of the missing files) and came up with 167 text files that make reference to the missing
files. The text files are a mix of machine
language and text. Tried recovering one but
the problem is it is a text file with no data
in the data resource fork. ProTools can't read it in its current form even if it was originally a ProTools file (or part of one).
Any idea on how to retrieve this data?

[coaster]

tough break man. it sounds like maybe the soundfiles are on a disk that is no longer present or something. did it accidentaly get recorded to a jazz disk? on occasion the disk allocater will do something strange like putting tracks on a disk you don't want to use.
if you can't recover the data, just remember next time that at the end of your session, do a "save copy as" and copy the audio files folder. then back up this copy. this will put all your audio files into a new folder, no matter how spread around your system they may be. i have had this problem in the past; i have several cd-r's of backed up data with missing files (RRRRR!) before i figured out how to properly back up my sessions.
my heart goes out to your lost audio, i hope you find the files, nortons probably didn't erase them, and i have never been able to accuratly unerase audio with nortons.
i am still thinking of a disk that is no longer there... is that possible?

[Ed Pettersen]

Thanks for the help. It turns out the files are gone. Norton didn't help. Somehow it seems a glitch happened while backing up that erased the files and turned them to text which are of course un-retrievable. Oh, well.........my engineer did warn me about "save as"..........oooops ! Damn !