Session Did Not Save - Audio Files Not in Folder

[Ricky Cobble]

Last Monday I opened a session that I had tracked 2 weeks prior. The session had not been open in between that time. This was the third song of the day in which we were recording lead vocals. We spent about and hour recording the vocals for this song. I had made nine playlists for this track. We finished the vocal and comped it. Played it back, everything seemed normal. Then, I closed the session and dragged the whole folder to the backup drive which was already mounted.

The computer did not have backup software, so I chose to just overwrite the previous backup that I had copied to the safety drive from the tracking date two weeks ago. Everyone left for lunch and I reopened the session to tweak on the vocal before the BGV session. My heart sank. All that was there was the first vocal pass of the first verse. I looked at the session file save time and it said 12:11 pm. I then looked in the session file backup folder which was set to save every 5 minutes and keep the last 12. There was only one session file backup of the session, it was dated 12:10pm. I then looked in the audio file folder, there were only three audio files of vocals. One of them is the first verse dated 12:11pm, the other two are small snippets of intro outtakes. My session lasted until around 1pm, so I'm wondering where are the rest of the vocal files are. Then I got to wondering why the session save was only after the first vocal pass of the first verse. Furthermore, why had the session file backup function stopped working after the first save. The first thing you think when something like this happens is, well the disk allocation was not set where you thought it was. Respectfully so, but the vocal for the first pass is in the audio file folder, properly allocated. Where did the other multiple takes go? Maybe the back up drive somehow ended up with the audio and upon backing up from the master drive to the backup drive after the session was closed out, I unknowingly accidentally overwrote the session where the rest of the audio files had been allocated. This would have destroyed any chance of getting those audio files back.

Knowing that lost data can not be recovered once more data is written, I was smart enough to not do anything to the master drive and get Jimmy English, the local digidesign tech, to look at the master drive. Using Data Rescue he found all of the missing files, about 20 of them. I was able to reassemble the comp just as I had before and we did not have to resing.

What would cause this to happen? Is it possible that at 12:11 the RAM held the session and played back okay but ceased saving the session and writing directories (TOC) for the audio that was being recorded?

What possible user errors could have occurred?

[sleadley]

From you description it seemed that the audio was recorded to the backup drive. Don't know why this would be, but it does underscore the need to use some sort of backup software instead of simple drag copies. We use Synk as this will check for differences between folders and only copy the files that are not in each folder, it will also show a preview. It also shows the names of the files being copied so you can see what is being done. It is also faster as only files that are changed are copied.
One thing to keep in mind in the future, is to unmount the backup drive to stop Pro Tools accidently linking to files on it. Only mount it when you wish to copy the sessions.
I hope this helps in the future
Simon L.

[Ricky Cobble]

After closing the session out on the master drive, I dragged the folder to the backup drive and replaced everything that was on the backup drive, which would have erased the audio files had they been allocated to that drive. As I mentioned above, the missing audio files were found on the master drive with data recovery software.