Had a scary problem earlier this week at BBC North with a Pro Tools system appearing not to write session files to the disk, either normal Saves or Save Session As or even Session File Backups.

Audio files, AudioSuite processed files and Fade Files all have been written to the drive so it doesn’t appear to be a permissions issue or a drive failing.

I did a search for all files created or modified yesterday and no session files came up, just the audio and fade files. It is as if Pro Tools was appearing to save but not actually writing the files to the disk.

I did a Deleted files scan of the drive with Data Resue 3, having taught it what ptf files look like, and found no recent copies of the session in question.

System is a G4 1.25 Mac Mini running Mac OS 10.4.x and Pro Tools 7.4LE with a 002R interface and all drives have Oxford Chipsets.

In researching the problem on the DUC I came across this post…

We’re investigating this and see a few other web reports of this happening with other apps, so we’re looking at possible causes, including OS services that may play a part.
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Avid Audio Tech Support

I have subsequently done a full deep scan with Data Rescue 3, and having taught it .ptf session files, it found over 1000 session files on the drive. I opened the 500 sessions that were larger than the latest session on the drive (300k) and although I found about 10 session files from the project in question, they all preceded the latest session on the drive.  This to me confirms that Pro Tools never wrote the files to the drive during that last day.

Having satisfied myself I couldn’t retrieve anything from the drive, I then ran a benchmark test on the drive, which is a Seagate 2.5″ Momentus IDE drive in a MacPower case with Oxford chipset. I benchmarked it to a recent Seagate SATA 2.5″ drive and it compared very well. Then I used the Integrity Test in Drive Genius II, set to write 16M files in random write for 30 minutes, and it proved to be very reliable. Finally I completed a full surface scan with Drive Genius II and it found no bad blocks so I believe the drive to be in A1 condition.

Comments (2):

1. 

   dwight marcus said:
   July 5, 2010 at 12:25 am

   For what it’s worth. I have a habit of leaving PT (HD running for an hour os so at a time to record large live sessions of 10 to 20 open mics. On three occasions – and on at least one a freeze-up style crash occurred – (but not on the other two incidents) there was absolutely NO record of the last session upon reopening PT. I know this is sloppy detailing for you, but I have seen this accursed behavior and been the target of well-deserved artist wrath. With a respected and seasoned tool like PT HD there is little cred in telling the artist that it crashed or did something ‘really weird’ and lost all of their creative outpourings. So I take the blame as the operator. My deep sympathies go out to you.
2. 

   dwight marcus said:
   July 5, 2010 at 12:26 am

   HD 8 was above changed to smiley face …