Pro Tools troubles Aaaarghh

[BrettB]

Hi all,

I have had some terrible pro tools troubles at my recording school today! In the small studio we recorded last year a demo of a band, and last week we tried to mix it. A part of the recordings were made on a fostex hard disk recorder, but extra tracks were made on a synced Digi 001 with Pro Tools LE.


When we put the system on last week suddenly, the whole system was completely messed up! We had wrong tracks on the wrong song, and he just couldn't find several audio files anymore. After cursing a lot, I tried to search for the missing audio files, but I didn't have any succes. Entire maps of audio files were missing in the songs directory, and audio files were scattered all over the hard disc. It seems it is practically not possible to fix and I lost lots of work

First I'll begin with the lessons I learned from this little disaster:

-I'll start to record destrustive next time. The hard disc was full of bad and old takes that the system hadn't trown away.
-I'm going to be more intelligent with naming tracks. When naming a track 'lead vocal 1', and your audio file folder is missing, as in this case, you find 10 to 12 matches when searching for it on your disc. And I ain't saying nothing yet about some punch ins that are called 'audio 1-01' when you forget to name them.


But now: How is this possible?? I mean: everything worked perfectely, the recordings were finished and safe, nothing was going on, each song and session had his own directory and map of audio files...? We think the only way this was possible is sabotage, but then again: the few people that use that studio, we can't think of anybody who can be such a mf to do that.

Or is this any other way that made this possible?

 

[charger]

Unless you have some sort of catastrophic virus, this cannot happen without someone doing it. Meaning, if you had recorded these sessions to Pro Tools (or any other system) and then turned the box off for a year, or left it in a room where no one could touch it for a year, your sessions would still be perfect. Clearly, someone was doing something on the system and accidentally deleted or moved some files. It happens. This is why, if you record a session, you should always go ahead and back it up when you have some spare time. I usually back up each new session within the week to CDR (or multiple CDRs, if your session is big). Generally, I zip the files first... Then label them clearly with the date of the backup. Then when I do something new to a session (like adding a bunch of overdubs, voclas, or if I come up with a really great mix) I back it up to CDR again.

I also like to keep each session (and all my songs from all my other music apps) on at least two separate hard disks at the same time, and sometimes on two separate computers. I do weekly backups of all the sessions on my audio drive (on both mac and pc) to each computer's system drive. So far, so good, though my PC's system drive is runnin out of space...

 

[BrettB]

Well, we all learn from our faulths, so next session I record I'll definetely back-up them. Pro Tools also asks, like most programs after closing, if you want to save changes. So it would be possible that somebody fiddled around with it and just pressed ok afterwards without considering the results.

That's the risk sharing a studio with others..