Unable to Save Copy As

[noiseboyuk]

I've done a forum search, but none of the solutions I've found work in my case.

I'm saving a complete copy of all my sessions in a series - audio and video. First three have gone through fine, but the fourth always returns an error - "Pro Tools cannot find the file path specified (3)". I've checked for any offline files, and there don't appear to be any. Loads of space on the drive.

All thoughts very gratefully received as I have to get this saved today!

Pro Tools 10.3.2
Win 7 Professional 64 bit
i7 2600k
32gb RAM

[musicman691]

You're not saving to a green drive or a drive that's gone to sleep are you? Or a drive on a USB port that's gone to sleep (Windows will unless you tell it otherwise to put recently unused USB ports to sleep to save power)?

[DetroitT]

Clip bin select all unused > Clear selected >remove then try again?

[noiseboyuk]

Hi Musicman - no, it's the same internal drive (at this stage) as everything else, no power-saving stuff.

Forgot to say - trashed databases, but still nada.

[noiseboyuk]

Cross posted with DetroiT at exactly the same time that it finally worked to an external drive. When copying back to internal, Windows came up with a more useful error - "file name too long"! Found one very long sound effect name in the project... so that's what it is. What's weird is that this internal drive is the same drive as the original project, which works fine and contains the same file. Never met this problem before - I wonder if there's a permanent fix for this?

In the meantime, keen just to get the damn thing done, off to rename the file in the PT project, and see if that resolves it.

[noiseboyuk]

Yup, that's it!

Very very odd - so the original session is fine with the long filename on the internal drive, copying to an external NTFS drive is fine with the long filename using "Save Copy As", yet both "Save Copy As" to the same internal drive and copying in windows back to the same internal drive causes a failure. Absolutely bizarre.

Thanks for the suggestions... when I have more time I'll investigate this at more length.

[sw rec]

Maybe it's a fail-safe since you're not supposed to record to your system drive?

[noiseboyuk]

Hmm, can't be that - it's not the system drive. It's the main drive I use for recording, a WD Black Caviar (the system drive is an SSD). I'm just copying files on the same drive. It defies all logic...

[jasonthurley]

Out of curiosity If you create a new blank session on the external and drag the session from the internal drive into your mix window.. then import all the session data... does it still have an error or can you now just save the new session without renaming?

[The Weed]

It`s possible that where you are saving the file to is adding just enough characters to the path string to put it over Window`s limit. On the other hand, I could be completely off base.

Cheers,