battery backup failure: audio files missing/assersion crash

[axisrecording]

This problem came up after a power outage yesterday in which my apc battery backup seemed to have worked, the power came back in about 30 seconds, and there appeared to be no problem. About an hour later the apc failed, started beeping, lost power, and showed a overload error. but when I tried to save or close I got the assertion error. I ran disk warrior on the system disk and it seemed to have solved the problem. Another engineer did a session into the night and everything worked fine. Yet another engineer did a session this morning, with several assertion crashes, but everything saved correctly. The night guy Came back today to find that the session opens but there are no audio files and the session didn't ask to locate them. The auto save pref was on, but there are no backups in the folder. and the dumbass didn't back-up all the work he did last night! Meanwhile I was mixing in another room (B) when the power went down, In this case the battery backup also seemed to work, it did not fail on this system, but when I tried to bounce to disk it gave me an assertion error and crashed. I ran disk warrior on that machine but it didn't help. I was able to workaround by setting up an audio track and recorded the mix to it via a bus. The third system (the backup server with it's own APC) seems ok. I, of course am terrified to use any of the systems. I plan to go through all the trouble shooting suggestions found at the top of this forum, but will still be afraid to trust the systems. Does anyone have any suggestions?

studio A:
G5 dual 1.8
OS 10.4.8
PT 7.2
2 192s HD2
2 gig ram
external firewire 800 (LaCie)

Studio B
G5 dual 2
os 10.4.8
PT 7.3cs2 (I think)
HD3 excel
192

[ThomasPMusic]

I would trash all the digi databases in the drives and the library folder. G5's can suck in alot of juice, so make sure the APC is rated for the capacity. A "browning out" and overloaded APC can do far more damage than a power failure. I've lost power many many times during remote recordings (only soundchecks where things were still getting plugged in) and never had a problem, even if I was recording at the time.
assertion stuff is usually drive related.
database trash, and clear and reformat the firewire drive.
You don't have audio files on firewire and internal because of a disk allocation screwup, do you, cause that will turn protools into a "havoc: generator!!:)
Don't for get digitest to check the cards for damage from a surge, etc...
Good luck.
tp
www.thomaspmusic.com

[Lee Blaske]

You've got to be careful about UPS's. First of all, you've got to stay on top of having fresh batteries in them. Secondly, you really need to make sure that you have more than ample capacity. It's easy to buy a UPS, and then continue adding things with the passing months until you've really got too much hooked up to it.

Also, I think there are a lot of folks who go with smaller supplies because they don't have fans, and don't make noise. If you need the juice, you need to get the bigger unit and put it in a machine room. I think it's also important to make sure that everything touching the computer system digitally is hooked up to the UPS.

[smlworld]

THE SAME THING happend to me! We must be on THE LOT? (in los angeles)

I went thru 2 power outages. (No batt back up as I was told I was on dedicated power with it's own back up, nuff said) I opend the session this morning. Did some work on it. tried to save and got the error. I had to Force quit PT as that was the only way out. Trashed all the prefs, blah blah. Re opened the session and ALL AUDIO was gone. the automation was all that was left. No regions, nada.

I re installed 7.3.1 cs2 and the back up sessions opened fine. (I have everything backed on on 3 drives)

BUT THAT EXPERIENCE totally sucked as i had a meeting this afternoon with the director.

anyway, the dissappearing audio is not a pretty thing.

10.4.8
intel mac 4 gigs mem
HD acel

[axisrecording]

Thanks everyone. It turns out that the session sent files to another firewire drive, but they were not usable, looked kind of like aliases, and not all the files were there. I'll have to check into the capacity of the UPSs, I had my network guy set me up and I'm not sure why the one failed well after the power came back on. I did all the trashing databases etc as suggested (except a few items that I didn't have enough time to figure out) on the trouble shooting thread before I worked today, and used a different drive. I only had one assertion crash, otherwise the system worked fine. Thanks again.