Missing files

[charles kasler]

I just opened up several old projects and the files are missing. There hasn't been any change in my setup or settings or interface. I did a search in one project but nothing showed up. What causes this? Is there any other recourse? Thanks!

[sjoens]

Audio files??  Were they stored on an external drive?  Check all global and per project audio folders.  If you know the name of the files you can use a search tool called EVERYTHING which will find them if they exist.

[Amberwolf]

3 hours ago, charles kasler said:

I just opened up several old projects and the files are missing. There hasn't been any change in my setup or settings or interface. I did a search in one project but nothing showed up. What causes this? Is there any other recourse? Thanks!

Have you removed or moved any files?  (this might be covered in " There hasn't been any change in my setup" but just to be sure....)

 

[charles kasler]

Thanks for the responses. Yes audio files, no external drive, I haven't moved or removed any unless I did something by accident

[mettelus]

Cakewalk doesn't delete audio files, so missing audio would imply you ran a cleanup utility. Write down the name of one of the missing audio files and try searching your entire computer with Windows Explorer for it. If you moved it or changed folder settings that will find it (so you can recover them). If you cannot, did you run any cleanup utility since you opened those projects last?

[charles kasler]

I did run it but only a few files found. I thought it was safe. I did get a message that some files were corrupted. What causes that?

[David Baay]

2 hours ago, charles kasler said:

I did get a message that some files were corrupted. What causes that?

The combination of missing files and corrupted files suggests some systemic failure or 3rd-party software  involvement. As Mettelus suggested, it's virtually impossible to have Cakewalk lose track of audio or delete it unintentionally without someone or something meddling with the file system directly.

[Amberwolf]

Does the cleanup utility have a log file that shows you which specific files were deleted?   Do those match the missing files?  If not, then it didn't delete them, and some other process or program or action has done so. 

 

If files have been deleted from the drive, there are recovery utilities that can locate and undelete them, but it's likely that parts of them have been overwritten by other data, a problem that grows worse the longer it has been since they were deleted.   With wave files (audio) it's likely that even with missing chunks you can still use the portions that are still present, but you would have to recreate or rerecord any missing bits. 

 

Just be careful and read up on reviews of any utility software before you download, install, or use it.   I've found over the years that while there are good ones, some of the utilities and "undelete" programs out there are not very good, some are not even real (just scamware to infect your computer with spyware/adware), and some are baitware, where they say they'll do some job but only do a scan to find things to fix but then charges you (more) to actually fix them.   I don't have any lists of which ones are any good these days as I haven't done this sort of thing in a long while. 

 

 

If the files were corrupted originally, you could have some program running that interferes with file operations, or that auto-defragments a drive but poorly and doesn't properly keep track of all the file chunks, or an actual hardware problem with your drive (bad sectors, etc) that is causing data loss. 

Edited Wednesday at 09:55 PM by Amberwolf

[charles kasler]

Wow thanks for all of the input! I need to sit with this and think about any third party utilities, nothing comes to mind at the moment

[sjoens]

Again, I recommend downloading EVRYTHING to search with.  Windows search is much slower and hit&miss at best.

[Amberwolf]

5 hours ago, charles kasler said:

Wow thanks for all of the input! I need to sit with this and think about any third party utilities, nothing comes to mind at the moment

Hmmm.  In this post it's implied that you used one...which specific utility did you actually run that is referred to in that post? Knowing what it is might suggest a recovery option.

Being very specific with the info in your replies to us will help us help you better. 

 

Edited 21 hours ago by Amberwolf

[charles kasler]

I just used the cakewalk audio finder which is supposed to be safe and then once a month I use privazer, however it's spelled. I researched it well before using it and it's been very good for several years causing no problems. That's all.

[sjoens]

A bad or damaged HDD can cause corrupted/missing files.  Happened to me once.  A $1500 recovery only found some of them.

[charles kasler]

I have an SSD although it's starting to slow down.

[mettelus]

6 hours ago, charles kasler said:

I just used the cakewalk audio finder

I have used that utility only once and the results were catastrophic for me. It decimated projects from older SONAR versions the same as what you mentioned in the OP. I had everything archived to backup drives so was just the pain to copy things back, but that single experience made me never open it again. I have seen people swear by it, but even if "operator error" can reproduce what I experienced, the tool is not trustworthy.

[charles kasler]

Thanks - do you mean Cake Audio Finder or Privazer? If it's Cake AF, how else do you delete clips that are no longer needed? This is good, I'm getting an education here.

[Amberwolf]

FWIW, if "Privazer" is a tool for secure erasing, using it means you cannot recover any files that are accidentally deleted.

On any system where *any* file, *ever*, is important to you, I would never run such a utility, because any deletion of a file means forever losing that data after you run that kind of utility. 

To prevent that loss you'd have to ensure you copy all your files over to some other media that you never run that utility on, and that then kinda defeats the purpose of a secure erase tool since now you'd have to ensure you've not copied over any files you want deleted, etc.

 

All I can really recommend given your present methods is to get an external backup drive and copy all your important files of any kind to it, then disconnect it from the computer and put it away.   Then regularly get it out and reconnect it and copy all the files again, preferably to a whole new separate folder, so that you have *all* the different sets of backup files.  It uses more space, but means less likelihood of data loss from a corrupt file.

The "best" way to do that kind of backup is to use multiple separate backup drives, and rotate thru them.  Say you have three drives; on week 1 you use drive 1, on week 2 you use drive 2, on week 3 you use drive 3, on week 4 you use drive 1, and so on.   That means even a disaster where something really bad happens (say, lightning hits a powerline and destroys everything you have plugged into the wall), you still have the copies of the data on the drives that you have put away not connected to anything at that moment, even if you had one of the drives doing a backup during the instant the disaster happens. 

It still doesn't protect you from things like fires or floods that could destroy everything in the location; that you'd have to have offsite backups (either a harddisk over at a friends or a safety deposit box at a bank, or online cloud-based backups, etc).   But if you're so worried about privacy intrusions that you're wiping data out, you probably wouldn't want to give copies of any of your data to anyone else, especially online. 

 

 

[David Baay]

7 hours ago, mettelus said:

14 hours ago, charles kasler said:

I just used the cakewalk audio finder

I have used that utility only once and the results were catastrophic for me.

I've used it for years without ever losing anything. So long as all the projects are on the same drive as the audio they reference, CWAF should not mis-identify  files as Orphaned. That said, after running it,  I move the files it identifies as Orphaned to a folder that's excluded from its scan and run it again to make sure nothing is identified as Missing before I empty that folder.

[Amberwolf]

6 hours ago, charles kasler said:

If it's Cake AF, how else do you delete clips that are no longer needed? 

Are you running low on space?  If not, there's not really any need to do anything about the unused clips.

If you really want to do it anyway, and your'e not low on space, you can first backup all of the data to some other drive (external to the computer, preferably, so you can disconnect it before doing any cleanup) as discussed above, then decide how you want to keep your projects around.

 

If you use per-project audio folders, then open a project, and then SaveAs a new file in a whole new project folder.  Say it's called Project1, you could SaveAs, and create a new folder called Project1Consolidated (or whatever), and SaveAs whatever you want to call the file like Project1ConsolidatedVersion1--112124.cwp.   It will automatically create an Audio folder inside that folder just for the audio in *this version* of the file, and copy over *only* those files from the old version to the new one.   Then, if you're sure you dont' want any of the old stuff, you can delete the old version including it's audio folder.  (but I would only do that after doing a backup to an external drive, in case a mistake is made).

 

You could also SaveAs a new file in the CWB format, the bundle, where it puts all the audio and file data all inside a single consolidated file.  Then you can delete everything other than that file, for that project, and when you open this file it will separate stuff out as needed.   But since it's a monolithic file, if anything gets corrupted in it, you can't just pull your audio clips out of it and start over--it's all trashed now. 

 

If you don't need to preserve all the little clips and just want access to the whole tracks, then select each track in a project and bounce all the clips together, so you have only one clip on each track.   SaveAs the project as a new file name (don't save it over the top of your old file).   

Even if you aren't using Per Project Audio Folders this creates single larger files for each track inside your audio folder, which will have the current date and time in the file properties.

When you're done doing this for all your projects, if you do it all on one day, then you can remove all the audio files that don't have today's date and time, and all the old project files not saved today.

 

There are variations of all these you can experiment with to find your best strategy that works with your workflow, etc.