Be careful using templates

[gracepoint]

Just wanted to share a bad experience I had with losing some audio files from a session. This is really hard to describe but here goes.
To start out I have some templates set up for different drum tracking setups etc. The templates are marked as read only files so when I go to save the new session I have to save it as a new name. Well...I started my session this way and went through with all of the tracking over a few days and it was all ready to mix.
I went to mix it a couple days later and when I opened the session I got an error message saying that some of my regions couldn't be found. I checked the pathname for the missing regions and it showed them being located in my folder I made to store my drum templates in. I can't figure out exactly what happened. I thought I might have started recording my drum audio tracks directly to the template session before saving the template under a new session name and location on my hard drive but what doesn't make sense to me is that the day before I found out about the missing regions I was cleaning up my hard drive and backing stuff up and I noticed in my templates folder there was an audio and a fade folder in the template folder. The first thing I suspected was what I just described above... "Do I have some of my audio files from a session saved in two different folders?" Well when I right clicked the audio folder and selected properties it said the folder contained 0 bytes so I deleted it. Anyway I'm guessing that the Pro Tools Session will play a session with audio files from different audio folders in different locations as long as it knows where all of the files are...but why the hell did the audio folder in my templates folder show it was an empty folder with no files. I was playing the session just fine for two days and then the regions were just gone. I've rambled enough...I'm pissed, and now I get to re-record the whole song from scratch. [img]images/icons/confused.gif[/img]