Avid Pro Audio Community

Avid Pro Audio Community

How to Join & Post  •  Community Terms of Use  •  Help Us Help You

Knowledge Base Search  •  Community Search  •  Learn & Support


Avid Home Page

Go Back   Avid Pro Audio Community > Legacy Products > Pro Tools TDM Systems (Mac)

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
  #11  
Old 04-20-2005, 05:46 AM
timc timc is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 1999
Location: Texas
Posts: 74
Default Re: new assistant\'s first BIG mistake

Check the archives of the last week or two of DAW-Mac list serve group.

There is a lengthy post by "Matt, Digidesign Test Engineer" about how... if you have not written back to the drive, or even really mounted it... it is possible using Terminal, HexEdit or TextEdit to recover the files.

It is time consuming and a giant PITA. But if it's a client's song, I'd give it a shot...

The text of Matt's post begins, "I feel your pain. I had a very similar problem recently. I backed up a session..."

It's a lengthy reply. And it was there on DAW-Mac in the last week or so.

Good luck.
Reply With Quote
  #12  
Old 04-20-2005, 07:50 AM
songman songman is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 694
Default Re: new assistant\'s first BIG mistake

If you want to be really sure and don't mind the cost, there are professional firms who specialize in just that. Do a search and you'll find several. I'd suggest at least getting in contact and asking for an estimate. They do it over the internet.

Cheers, Bob.
Reply With Quote
  #13  
Old 04-20-2005, 08:13 AM
DigiTechSupt's Avatar
DigiTechSupt DigiTechSupt is offline
Avid
 
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Worldwide
Posts: 33,877
Default Re: new assistant\'s first BIG mistake

Here's is a list of data recovery companies and software. Data Rescue may be your best option - I've used it personally and it does a very admirable job. If you plan on using it, know that it takes a VERY long time to process (20+hours for a 120gb drive...) and you should turn off the computer or disconnect the drive with the data to be recovered on it immediately, so as to have the best chance for proper data recovery.

CBL 905-479-9938 http://www.cbltech.com
Data Recovery Group http://www.datarecoverygroup.com
Drive Service Company http://www.driveservice.com
DriveSavers 800-440-1904 http://www.drivesavers.com
ECO http://www.prosofteng.com
IBAS + 47 62 88 29 00 http://www.ibas.no
Lazarus 800-341-3282 http://www.lazarus.com
Ontrack 800-752-7557 http://www.ontrack.com
Total Recall 800-743-0594 http://www.totalrecall.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
DiskWarrior http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior
Norton SystemWorks http://www.symantec.com
Data Rescue http://www.prosofteng.com/
__________________
Avid Audio Tech Support
Help us help you - read this before posting
Support FAQ
Reply With Quote
  #14  
Old 04-20-2005, 08:35 AM
Farmer Dave Farmer Dave is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Jan 1999
Location: Marin County, CA USA
Posts: 977
Default Re: new assistant\'s first BIG mistake

Quote:
thanks for the replies
I've been training this kid for a while and this is the first project in which he is operating ProTools on his own, he was mortified, I didn't even yell at him, he will never do it again.
Good for you! This is a hard lesson, but I'd put good money on it that this person will NEVER do that again. You can't BUY training this intense.

Just to reiterate what's already been said, Norton's Unerase, and be sure to recover to another drive to avoid writing in the erased drives directory.
Reply With Quote
  #15  
Old 04-20-2005, 09:38 AM
Richard Barrie Richard Barrie is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Jan 1999
Location: London, U.K.
Posts: 203
Default Re: new assistant\'s first BIG mistake

What I have done in the past is to first make a clone of the disk that has the erased files and then try various techniques to recover the erased data from the clone. This means that if your first attempt does not work you can reclone the disk and try another way.
There are various ways of making a clone, which has to be done by 'blind copying' block by block. For example if you still have a Mac with OS9 you can do a block copy using Hard Disk Toolkit (which is what I use) but there are other utilities.
If the drive is a Firewire drive you will need to remove the actual drive from the Firewire enclosure and install it as an internal drive on the OS9 Mac that you will be using to make the blind copy.
This is extremely time consuming and tedious, but it does give you the safety net of being able to try fixes using different recovery techniques and if all else fails you can send the original disk off to a data recovery service without having modified it in any way.
Norton Unerase usually will recover the erased files.
Good luck
Reply With Quote
  #16  
Old 04-20-2005, 10:34 AM
mattpete's Avatar
mattpete mattpete is offline
Avid
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: California
Posts: 201
Default Re: new assistant\'s first BIG mistake

I am the Matt in question who posted the manual OS X data recovery solution to the DUC. It's free but takes a lot of time. I suggest that your assistant attempt to recover the data using this method. Off the clock, of course. That way, he's sure to learn the importance of data management.

-Matt
__________________
Matt Peterson
Avid Audio
Reply With Quote
  #17  
Old 04-20-2005, 10:46 AM
Rail Jon Rogut Rail Jon Rogut is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Dec 1969
Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA
Posts: 14,492
Default Re: new assistant\'s first BIG mistake

Here's a copy of the Mac-DAW post I made:
----------------------------------------

Below is a post from the DUC for trying to recover audio off a drive in OS X..
it's long and only to be attempted as a last resort (IMO):

*******************************

I feel your pain. I had a very similar problem recently. I backed up a session
then put it in the Trash and Emptied and then realized I had audio files in that
session folder that were from a different session. Since I had used Save Session
Copy In to do the backup, those files weren't copied. So they were gone. Or so I
thought.

First and most important thing: Do NOT use the hard disk for anything!! Don't
even launch Pro Tools with the thing connected. Pro Tools may very well update
the .ddb file on that drive which could overwrite important data. Just leave it
unconnected until you are ready to attempt recovery, which I will describe next.

You will need three programs (well, two actually, but a text editor makes life
simpler):
1. Terminal (found in your Applications:Utilities folder)
2. HexEdit (freeware)
3. TextEdit (in your Apps folder) or, my favorite, TextEdit (by Haxial)

You will also need an extra hard disk or two, and a Pro Tools system capable of
playing the same audio files you are trying to recover (i.e.: if you're trying
to get back 96kHz files, you need a 002 or HD rig.) For simplicity's sake we're
going to refer to your precious hard disk as the Source Disk and the extra hard
disks as your Destination Disk(s).

Here's what you're going to do
1. Read raw data off of the hard disk, 1GB at a time, to a second hard disk.
2. Attach audio file wrapper data to each raw data file. Do this THREE times if
you are trying to recover 24-bit audio data. Do it TWICE if you're recovering
16-bit data. I'll explain.
3. Import the new audio files into Pro Tools.
4. Manually comb through the audio files in Pro Tools to find the data you want.
This part of the process may take quite a while and test your patience, but if
the data is really important, you'll do it.

Some caveats (in no particular order)
1. This is going to take time. Quite a bit of time. If you need this done
quickly, and you're getting paid, it might be better to send it to a data
recovery company and pay big $$. That's up to you.
2. This is going to take up a lot of disk space. The bigger the hard disk you
are trying to recover, the more space you'll eventually need. As a rule of
thumb, figure on 4x the amount of disk space from the original drive. If you
don't have this much extra space, you can do it in chunks, but some of the
time-saving techniques won't be as useful.
3. You need to know what type of audio files you're looking for. File format,
sample rate and bit depth. If you are trying to recover a whole bunch of
different file types or you don't know the types, you're in for a REALLY LONG
HAUL. You'll basically have to repeat this entire procedure for each file type.
If you're willing to do that you must have some really important audio files to
recover. Good luck.
4. Again (worth repeating), do NOT write to your affected disk drive until you
have recovered your audio or given up. This is really important. Since you
emptied the trash, the computer doesn't know where those audio files are and
could write over them without warning if you save something to that disk.

How to do it
1. Connect your Source and Destination Disks to your computer.
2. Boot up.
3. Launch Terminal.
4. In Terminal type su. Enter your password. You're now in superuser mode. Be
careful.

Now you need to find out some info via unix:
5. In Terminal type df. This will show the mount point of your drives. On far
right is the name of the disk; e.g. /Volumes/MyDiskName. On far left is "unix
device mount point", e.g. /dev/disk1s9. 1 is the disk number (e.g. 1st disk
found since booting). 9 is the partition number.
6. Find your disk in this list by the name and note down the mount point. This
is how you will tell unix where to read raw data from.

Here goes the main recovery effort. I suggest you read ahead before you actually
type this stuff.
7. In Terminal type dd if=/dev/rdisk1s9 of=/Volumes/MyDestinationDisk/01
count=2m

Okay, what's all this about?
dd This is a unix command that allows raw data reading/writing.
if= Tells dd command that this is the Input File.
/dev/rdisk1s9 This is your mount point that you found in step 5. The numbers
will probably be different on your system. The r is added in to tell dd that you
want to do a raw disk read. The r is very important!
of= Tells dd command that this is the Output File.
/Volumes/MyDestinationDisk/01 Here's where you need to put in your Destination
Disk name. Keep the /Volumes/ part since this is the same on all OS X systems
and then type the name of the hard disk volume you want to write to. Add a slash
after the name and then type a file name for the new raw data file you're going
to create. I use numbers, like 01 since this command will be executed many
times. Each time I increase this file number by 1 to keep things organized.
(Unix scripters will see opportunity for automation here but doing it manually
gives the same results.)
count=2m This tells dd how much data you want to read. 2m=1GB. (Unix deals in
512 Kilobyte chunks.)

8. If this all looks fine and dandy to you, press Enter. You won't see much
going on but if you look at your drive access lights you'll see that reads and
writes are occuring.

Now you may be wondering how unix knows which 1GB of data to read off of your
drive? Simple. It just reads the first 1GB of data. So how do you get it to read
the 2nd GB? or the 3rd? Or the 49th? Easy. Just add an additional command at the
end of the dd line that says skip=2m. This tells dd to start reading raw data
1GB from the beginning of the disk. You'd use this to create your second raw
data file. Your third file would need skip=4m added to it. The fourth will need
skip=6m. Etc. A handy equation for this is of=N skip=(N*2-2)m. I.e.: Your Output
File number is N and the number in the skip part is N*2 - 2.

So your second raw data recovery will look like:
dd if=/dev/rdisk1s9 of=/Volumes/MyDestinationDisk/02 count=2m skip=2m

Your third raw data recovery will look like:
dd if=/dev/rdisk1s9 of=/Volumes/MyDestinationDisk/03 count=2m skip=4m

Your fourth raw data recovery will look like:
dd if=/dev/rdisk1s9 of=/Volumes/MyDestinationDisk/04 count=2m skip=6m

And so on. Until you've recovered all your data or run out of disk space on
Destination Disk. If you have to stop in the middle, make note of where you left
off and DISCONNECT your Source Disk.

How to speed up the raw data recovery process.
You may have noticed that each 1GB of data takes a long time to recover. I don't
suggest you use your computer for any other tasks during this process so you
probably want to do this stuff late at night or whenever the computer is not in
use. But you don't want to be there babysitting the thing all night long.
There's a solution. You can type commands into unix one after another if you
seperate them with a semicolon. That's what I use TextEdit for. It's much easier
to copy and paste a whole bunch of those commands into TextEdit, then scroll
through and change the Output File names (the numbers) and the skip commands.
Then you can copy and paste out of TextEdit back into Terminal. You'll end up
with something like this:
dd if=/dev/rdisk1s9 of=/Volumes/MyDestinationDisk/01 count=2m; dd
if=/dev/rdisk1s9 of=/Volumes/MyDestinationDisk/02 count=2m skip=2m; dd
if=/dev/rdisk1s9 of=/Volumes/MyDestinationDisk/03 count=2m skip=4m; dd
if=/dev/rdisk1s9 of=/Volumes/MyDestinationDisk/04 count=2m skip=6m; etc.
I find that resizing the TextEdit window so that one dd command fits perfectly
on a line also helps in making the edits correctly.
Be careful! This is a powerful technique for getting things done in a big batch,
but if you make a small typing error you can do disastrous things to your hard
disks. Or you can accidentally write each new raw data file over the previous
one, which means you won't really know what you recovered and you'll have to
start over. If you know how to write shell scripts in unix, I'm sure you'll be
automating this whole process. I found it more satisfying to be able to see each
and every command written out before I let them loose on my system.
Also, don't forget that you need to do the superuser mode change each time you
launch Terminal. And you should recheck the df command to make sure the mount
points didn't change (they can every time the system boots.)

You're one-third of the way there.
The next step is to add the audio file wrappers so you can import these new raw
data files into Pro Tools, but first you need to create the wrapper files. There
are two files to make a wrapper, one that comes first, then your raw data, then
a second wrapper. I'll call these wrappers header and footer. You'll use the
same footer for each raw data file, but you'll need to create three headers for
each raw data file. Why? Pro Tools records 24-bit data. 24-bit data is broken up
into three 8-bit chunks. Since you recovered raw data, you don't know what the
right ordering of the three chunks. The only way to make sure you can get all
audio data back is to create three versions of each raw data file, each version
being a different ordering of the 8-bit chunks. So you'll need to create three
header files, the second one being 1 byte longer than the first, and the third
being 2 bytes longer than the first. When you attach the raw data to each of
these, the byte ordering will start in each of the three possible places
allowing you to find all the audio data that may be in the raw files. Sounds a
little complicated but it's really not.

Creating header and footer files
1. Disconnect your precious Source Disk!!!
2. Launch Pro Tools.
3. Create a session in the same file format, sample rate and bit depth as the
data you're trying to recover. If you don't know, you'll have to create headers
and footers for each file type and do everything from here on over and over
until you find your data. If this is your situation, think long and hard about
how important those files are. Unless you have original recordings of
spacealiens I suggest you forget trying to recover and re-record stuff. If you
DID have original recordings of spacealiens and you didn't make a backup copy
immediately then I suggest you sell your computer and get a job in a less
intellectually demanding field. That said, mistakes happen. I made such a
mistake. Luckily, I remembered the file type, sample rate, bit depth and even
the number of channels of what I was looking for. So I pressed on.
4. Make a selection on your timeline that will create an audio file 1GB in size.
5. Press Option-Shift-3 to create a blank audio file with your selection.
6. You'll need to do this several times to zero in on the exact time needed to
create a 1GB file. I'm not sure how exact you have to be but I got it to the
exact file size through trial and error. Come to think of it, it's probably
better to have a little bigger file than exactly 1GB because the headers and
footers will take a little space. Oh well. My recovery worked well. I got back
over 99% of my lost data (about 4 hours worth) and that was good enough for me.
7. Quit Pro Tools once you have your 1GB audio file. Name that file something
like 1GBAudioFile.
8. Now launch HexEdit.
9. Open 1GBAudioFile in HexEdit. A sea of numbers will fill the window. Don't
flinch.
10. HexEdit shows the raw hex data of the open file on the left side and the
"human readable" version on the right. Sometimes you can make out words on the
right side, but for audio data it just looks like garbage. Scroll down through
the data until you see a large amount of zeroes that goes on forever. This is
the audio data. Since you created a blank audio file, it's just zeroes in there,
so it's easy to see where it begins and ends.
11. Find the beginning of the audio data.
12. Copy all the data from just before the audio data all the way to the
beginning of the file.
13. Create a new file in HexEdit and copy this data into it.
14. Name this file "HeaderA".
15. In HeaderA file, copy and paste a single 00 to the end of the file.
16. Name this file "HeaderB".
17. In HeaderB file, copy and paste a single 00 to the end of the file.
18. Name this file "HeaderC". You now have three header files, each one byte
longer than the previous one. Now for the footer.
19. Find the end of the audio data in the original 1GBAudioFile. It's the where
the zeros all end and you get a few non-zero numbers showing up. There will be
more zeros after this (where the waveform drawing data is stored) so make sure
you scroll in far enough to get the end of actual audio data. This could take a
while since you're looking at A LOT of data.
20. Copy all the data from the end of the audio data to the end of the file.
21. Create a new file and copy this data into it.
22. Name this file "Footer".
23. Quit HexEdit.
24. Eat something, take a break.
25. Copy the three Header and one Footer files into the same folder with your
raw audio data files.
26. Launch Terminal.
27. Type cd and then drag the folder containing your raw audio files into the
Terminal window. It will autofill the pathname for you. Hit Enter. Now you are
in the same directory (folder) as your raw audio files so commands will look for
files in this directory.
28. Type cat HeaderA 01 Footer > 01A; cat HeaderB 01 Footer > 01B; cat HeaderC
01 Footer > 01C This is three commands in a row (note the semicolons.) Each one
says concatenate file HeaderA then file 01 then file Footer in that order into a
new file called 01A. Then do the same for B, then C. So you now have three
copies of your raw data file with the audio file wrappers on them. They are now
ready to be imported into Pro Tools.
29. Repeat step 28 for every raw data file you recovered. You can queue up a lot
of these commands with semicolons just like you did with the dd command earlier,
as long as you have the disk space. As you can now see, you'll have three more
1GB files on your drive for each 1GB raw data file, making 4GB of data. This is
where the 4x space requirement comes from. If you're doing an 80GB drive, you'll
eventually need 320GB of space to check every bit of space on the disk for audio
(no pun intended.) Breaking it up into smaller chunks, like doing 10GB of a time
might be necessary if you don't have lots of free disk space. And remember,
don't use your original precious hard disk!! Don't even think about writing to
it until you are completely done recovering data from it.
30. If you are trying to recover 16-bit data, then you only need to create two
copies of each raw data file. There are only two bytes of 8 bits each in this
case.

The moment of truth
You have three 1GB files for each 1GB of space on your original disk. Now you
need to put them in Pro Tools and start listening to them and looking at them to
identify audio data and save it.
1. Launch Pro Tools.
2. Create a new session at the same sample rate, bit depth, format as your
recovered data.
3. Import files 01A, 01B and 01C to Audio Tracks.
4. Let the waveforms redraw. If they don't automatically redraw, select them in
the Region Bin and force the redraw.
5. You are now looking at the the first 1GB of data from your drive, presented
with three different byte orderings. You will probably see large regions of what
looks like solid full code noise (looks like a brick when zoomed out).
Interspersed with these bricks you'll hopefully see what looks like regular
audio.
6. Turn down your speakers!!! You're going to be hearing some unpleasant noises
coming from your system. Do not use headphones.
7. Solo one of the tracks and start playing the parts that look like actual
audio data. If it sounds right, then go ahead and select and delete the regions
on the other two tracks that are in the same place as the good audio data.
You're deleting what is the same data as the good stuff, just shifted one or two
bits so what should be the bottom 8 bits of your audio is now the top 8 bits or
something like that. Go ahead and listen to some of it. Depending on the
original material, there may be some interesting stuff in there especially if
you like noise and distortion.
8. Repeat step 7 for each of the three tracks until you've gotten rid of all the
stuff that you know is junk. You'll be left with mostly real audio and probably
some unknown sections that don't appear to have audio on them in any of the
tracks. Listen to the unknown stuff and determine if it's of any value. Most
likely it's junk.
9. Repeat it all with the each and every file you recovered and created.
10. You may have noticed while going through the audio that some stuff will get
cut off at the end of a file and then pick up at the beginning of the next one.
This is helpful so you can edit stuff back together. You'll also notice that
you've lost all meaningful timing relationships between tracks that were
recorded at the same time, or edited together later. You'll have to reassemble
your session manually. This may sound nightmarish, but if this data is really
that important to recover and you've come this far, you can probably recreate
the session even better than you did originally. Good luck.

The End
If you completed this process like I did, you'll now have most or all of your
original audio back and ready to work within Pro Tools. You will be elated to
have recovered what was seemingly lost forever. You'll learn several things
along the way, but most importantly, you'll learn the importance of backing up
important data.

There might be a few typos here and there. Please post corrections if you find
problems and I'll try to check back in and edit this post.

Cheers,
-Matt, Digidesign Test Engineer

***********************************************

Good luck

Rail
__________________
Platinum Samples
www.platinumsamples.com
Engineered Drums for BFD
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Reply With Quote
  #18  
Old 04-20-2005, 11:03 AM
mattpete's Avatar
mattpete mattpete is offline
Avid
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: California
Posts: 201
Default Re: new assistant\'s first BIG mistake

Here's a link to the original that is formatted for better readability. Has links, too.

http://duc.digidesign.com/showflat.p...ev=#Post637745

-Matt
__________________
Matt Peterson
Avid Audio
Reply With Quote
  #19  
Old 04-20-2005, 11:57 AM
timc timc is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 1999
Location: Texas
Posts: 74
Default Re: new assistant\'s first BIG mistake

Quote:
Here's a copy of the Mac-DAW post I made:

Lengthy post here....

Good luck

Rail

Sorry Rail! I printed out the text and clipped the heading. So, I didn't know who had posted... Thanks for reprinting!

TC
Reply With Quote
  #20  
Old 04-20-2005, 05:30 PM
vico vico is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Dec 1999
Location: mexico, df, mexico
Posts: 47
Default Re: new assistant\'s first BIG mistake

hello,

i am sure matt's post has a lot of technical background. i did recover the audio files from a session, that got lost by a similar mistake. i did use the following program:

http://www.subrosasoft.com/webstore/...&products_id=1

what i did was this:

1. ran the program, and recovered all files to another <clean> disk, it did not recover the files with the original names, and you will not know if the files are audio/video/spreadsheet/word files, but keep readingη
2. once my now deleted/salvaged files were copied to a different disk, i did launch protools, with a copy of a back up session (the ones autosave generate)
3. when pro tools asked me for the unlinked files, i indicated to it to search them by unique ID, even when the files no longer have the original name, pro tools is going to be able to link to the apropiate files, after it finds them by unique ID. commited the links, maybe file by file and that's it. it really saved my ass once.

the program is about US 90, not expensive if you consider what it does, in a 200GB disk expect to spend about 5/6 hours.

hope it helps/works

vico.
sonido mambo
Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Editing mistake paz2c 003, Mbox 2, Digi 002, original Mbox, Digi 001 (Mac) 5 08-07-2010 01:28 AM
Convince me PT was not a mistake. [email protected] 003, Mbox 2, Digi 002, original Mbox, Digi 001 (Win) 77 04-19-2010 05:15 AM
Deleted by mistake peccatte 003, Mbox 2, Digi 002, original Mbox, Digi 001 (Win) 5 04-24-2009 12:03 PM
Please help me, I might have made a big mistake geraldg 003, Mbox 2, Digi 002, original Mbox, Digi 001 (Win) 25 01-12-2004 08:03 PM
did i make a mistake????? skyking 003, Mbox 2, Digi 002, original Mbox, Digi 001 (Win) 6 05-05-2002 10:14 AM


All times are GMT -7. The time now is 10:48 AM.


Powered by: vBulletin, Copyright ©2000 - 2008, Jelsoft Enterprises Limited. Forum Hosted By: URLJet.com