Pro Tools spontaneously wipes all track playlist data!

[sailor]

Has anyone encountered a “quirk” in Pro Tools in which one is editing and mixing, saving regularly, auto-backup and all that….and then when the session is closed and then re-opened, the playlists (on some of the tracks) are completely empty, as in Pro Tools simply has deleted the contents of the tracks?

I’ve now had two sessions in two weeks in which this has happened. Long form TV mixes with TONS of edits that have just gone up in smoke. When I look through my Session File Backups, I can see that at some point the session backup files suddenly go from, say, 8MB in size to around 4MB…..the difference attributable to all the edit/mix data that has just gone POOF.

Prior to the session close and re-open, I am saving obsessively every minute or so, and the backup files are automatically created….and the session functions normally even though the file I’m saving, as far as Pro Tools apparently seems to think, does not actually contain the playlist content that I’m listening to as I work. I only notice the bomb that PT has dropped on me when I close the session and re-open, finding completely empty tracks.

Tech particulars:
PT 2021.7.0
MacOS 11.6
Mac mini
Storage: removable USB drives

Thankfully on both occasions I’ve lost only an hour of work rather than a day of work. But this could easily have been an absolutely catastrophic total loss of work….I was just “lucky” enough discover the ruination of my session before the backup buffer purged the last relatively intact copy.

Anyone who has experienced this and is aware of some way to prevent Pro Tools from DESTROYING a session in this fashion, please advise.

[Darryl Ramm]

Uh Negative.

Some troubleshooting ideas, the may or may not be useful...

One suspect would be a corrupt session. Or possibly some confusion around multiple copies of the session existing and you possibly opening the wrong one... I know a long shot but think through all possible things that might be happening, including any possibility of you launching a session say on a transfer drive when you meant to open a local copy. I've seen really bizzare things happen where folks are working in the folder where a transfer thumb drive would normally be mounted, etc.

Any chance you have an external drive that is mounting and dismounting itself? Or just dismounted (ejected) when you thought it was working?

What exact drive are you saving content to? What filesystem is on them? No chance the USB drive is shared/mounted over a network and somebody else is accessing sessions on it?

You are saving all the assets into the session folder on that drive?

Yes I understand this is different than a usual unlinked/missing assets.

Does this only happen with one session? Or copies of one session? Can you reproduce it with others?

...and 2021.7 is not officially qualified on macOS 11.6.

[BScout]

Yes. There was a version this happened. You would see session file size suddenly drop. If you search the forums, you'll probably find those threads.
I can't remember the cause of it (might have been the OS or something about auto-save.)

But you are on an old version on an even older macOS so... not sure many people will chime in suffering your issue anymore. 11.6 was not a good macOS. Most of the "legacy" macOS users stopped at High Sierra (for technical/Apple reasons) and that is a good macOS for Pro Tools.

[Farhoof]

It's a long running issue not yet resolved.
Also see https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=405902

[sailor]

Originally Posted by Farhoof

It's a long running issue not yet resolved.
Also see https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=405902

Yep, that's identical to my situation. Hate to see that other people have endured it, but sort of good to know that I have company in my misery I guess.

Not too impressive that it's a documented bug (and a particularly nasty one) going back a few years and still happening, but such is life. Adding asset-integrity paranoia to my workday is not a good development.

My workaround for now is that I'm doing Save As to a new file rather than just overwriting the same one with incremental saves, and putting a timestamp in the filename so I know exactly when it was created.