Cakewalk deleted my stuff! HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Capt. Snazzy]

i would consider myself an experienced cakewalk user and i build computers and service them for a living, so i've seen my share of bad crap. but the other day, i booted up my machine, opened cakewalk and opened my latest project and that sickening message came up about the track wavs not being found. i then checked my wavedata directory and it was empty. i almost cried, that was about 6 months down the crapper, so i uninstalled, re-installed and got started again, then last night, after just finishing some touch-ups to my song, closed down cakewalk,saving all changes, then my taSCAM us-428 crapped up and i rebooted. when everything came back up, the wavedata directory was once again empty. i've checked all the help files and faqs both in the program and online. i have all the updates and i know that it's not a problem with my hard drive setup, because the only files that are missing are the track wavs in the wavedata directory, the only thing i can figure is that having emagic's soundiver software running in the background did something, but i can't understand what. i get no error messages when i have them both running, i honestly don't really have a clue what to do, i even set cakewalk to autosave every 5 changes, but it's all gone when the track files disappear.i'm having some clients come in soon and i can't have this going on then. that just won't work, someone please tell me that this is fixable. here are my specs:
gigabyte ga-7i1xe m/b with amd 751 chipset
384 mb pc-100 ram
thunderbird 1ghz processor (she's a sweet ride when everything works!)
2 20 gb ata-66 5400's, one on each onboard ide channel
1 40 gb ata-66 promise raid array with 2+0 striping (this is my audio drive, cakewalk is set up here as is the wavedata dir.)
Riva tnt2 32mb agp
soundblaster live
aurreal vortex2
realtek ethernet card (disabled most of the time because the tascam hates it)
taSCAM us-428 (demon possesed driver version 1.0 don't buy one)
Win ME
Cakewalk 9.03
emagic soundiver version, uh, crap, i think it's the newest one, off the pod website.
someone please read this and have all the answers for me.
this is a very humbling experience, i can usually fix it, but this is kicking my hiney. well, thanks in advance for any posts.

[John Sayers]

Have you tried creating a wavedata folder somewhere else and creating files in it? do they still appear? Perhaps there is a file recovery programme you could use.
I hope someone knows an answer to this, I feel for you Capt.
cheers
John

[Capt. Snazzy]

yeah, i've tried having the wavedata dir all over the place
the thing is, it doesn't happen consistently so i don't know for sure what works, and i really want to leave it on the raid array since that is the only purpose for that setup
(two drives acting as one, which gives you almost triple the sustained throughput of one alone, perfect for a daw)
but maybe that's it, cross your fingers, i just completely uninstalled it again and re-setup the whole program including all the preferences and everything, so maybe i got it, maybe not... i'm really hoping that tascam will hold good on their promise of new drivers soon for that blue paperweight, my machine worked perfectly until i plugged that turd in. now it hates me, and seeks to thwart my every attempt at doing something audio related. well, thanks for the post! keep 'em coming!!!

[dachay2tnr]

Wow, that sounds pretty bad. I'm clueless as to what could be happening, but I find it mystifying that the files could actually have just disappeared.

I assume you've done a search of your hard drive (*.wav) to see if they might be being written to another directory.

Also, do you have the Cakewalk Audio Finder tool (CWAF)? I think this program comes with Pro Audio Suite. If so, you might try running that and see what results you get.

I feel for you. Good luck.

[chuchosay]

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one. That's right, the same damn thing happened to me. I had 16 tracks of stereo audio on there, and then POOF! Gone! I noticed that it only happened if I left the file alone for about a week, though. I have changed a bunch of my settings since then, and it hasn't happened yet again, but I have started to back up my files with a Cakewalk bundle file (it saves the wave files in the cakewalk file instead of using the wavedata as reference). The only problem is that it takes an enormous amount of memory to do that for every song. Let's hope it doesn't happen again to either of us.

Sharing your pain,
Chuchosay

[John Sayers]

Capt.. I had that happen when i lost some files on floppy when i was using cubase on an atari. I sent the discs (read you HD) to a mob in sydney who refound the files. Is there anywhere in your town you could take you HDrive to?
cheers
john

[wariwari3]

hey same here

this happenned to me also at one point.
to this day i don't know what happenned to the files i erased.

i believe this is due to human error.

but i tell you one thing. my buddy chuchosay has hit it right on the button

every time you save your projects as a cakewalk bundle it will not dissappear unless you erase it.

what i do now days since its a pain in the ass to wait for a bundle to open, is make it a point to save it at the end of the sessions (like the old days when you were putting your master tapes away, remember? )

so, bundle up.

wari

[Capt. Snazzy]

i've set everything up again, i still don't know what happened but i'm not going to worry about it. i'll just make sure i have bundle backups of everything important.
anyway, thanks alot for all the posts and suggestions.

[Genie]

I've had a similar problem happen, I thought my wrkstation was tight like a bundle of campfire wood, no problems, running nt4 and pro audio 9. I decided that i wanted realtime level monitoring and better pluggin's so i upgraded to sonar which forced the upgrade to windows 2000. Well i opened up a recent project and started using it, i thought, very cool. Then i went back to remix some old projects and sure enough, got the can't find wav's bit. It looks like cakewalk deleted files that were up to a certain age, some projects have some data, all old projects are lost. I had a few bun backups on cdr but still, i'm devasted, no remixing on a majority of my pending stuff. Fut. Also experiencing massive latency with my delta 44 w/ sonar. Fut. That should work itself out but i'm a lot pissed off about cakewalk ruining many of my projects because of an inability to manage files. Fut. But oh well, i'm not a pro and can't afford pro tools and i find it rewarding when i fix a problem but....