Hi
I have been assembling a podcast, with 8 tracks, including a heavily-edited interview, some rather clever sound effects and music segues. We just laid in a VO track using punch-and-roll, and it was all cutting together beautifully. BUT....last night, when I was about an hour from completing -- the project just vanished. No spinning beachball, no warning. As if a witch had cursed it ... poof.
I confidently restarted Audition and sent in a crash report, but when Audition reopened the project, it was missing all the work done over the past two days -- instead of 8 tracks, there were two. Two crappy tracks.
I started tracking back in my backup files and realized with mounting horror that EVERY backup file going back to yesterday afternoon was exactly the same. The dates were off -- the imprinted date and time in the file did not match the "Date created" or "date modified" in my (old) iMac. They were all the same small size -- 76kb.
I finally callmed down and went back down the list of backup files, trashing all the 76kb versions -- until I found an .sesx file at 156k, which does contain the eight tracks, but was created at 3pm yesterday, when the error apparently started compounding itself. I have done a TON of work since then, which is not in this multitrack project, and every backup since then is the same, 76kb, 2-track file.
I have a practice of renaming my session file with the current date and time, then saving to the same folder (all are located on a remote 5TB Media Storage Drive. My internal drive is too crowded to handle Audition projects and media). The project files seemed rather jumbled -- projects inside of projects, multiple backup folders within backup folders -- so something is wrong there. I have autosave set to save every 3 minutes, with a limit of 100 backup files -- which obviously the program is not doing.
The computer on restart was very sluggish and commands obeyed only after significant delays, so I ran disk utility, Etrecheckpro, and CleanMyMac. No major problems were discovered, except limited RAM -- I have maxed out at 16gb. But I shut down all other apps while running Audition, so that should not be a problem.
Once I found what is apparently the most recent back-up, I exported that session, with full media files, to a second external drive, where I will leave it alone.
I am with some trepidation about to open the latest session and start rebuilding this episode, which MUST go up today. I optimistically named it "recovery."
What precautions should I take, other than wearing a mask and social distancing?
Thanks very much. Etrecheck report available on request.
Rob
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