recover restore revive resuscitate a lost session

[DMcD Productions]

I am about to start the re-edit of a complicated hour documentary because I apparently trashed the .sesx file by mistake and then diligently did my regular backup on my external which erased the .sesx over there.  Having recently switched to Adobe from APPLE, I looked for the Final Cut Pro auto-emergency-save-backup-every-five-minutes-because-the-editor-is-an-idiot option but, alas, I have learned that does not exist in Audition.  I have now added the step export-session-with-copied-all-media-ticked option at the end of every work day.  This is a rookie welcome-to-Adobe mistake, yes?  Is there some secret temporary stash of .sesx files that does not show up in a search?

[SuiteSpot]

There has been an "Auto save recovery data every [user supplied] minutes" option under Preferences > Multitrack since at least CS5.5 and no there are no "secret temporary stash of .sesx files"

[DMcD Productions]

I have the auto save recovery data box checked and set at every five minutes in preferences.  How do I recover this data if there is no .sesx project file?

[DMcD Productions]

I am screwed.  My contribution to the Adobe suggestion box is to add an autosave .sesx feature.

1. Re: Auto Save in Audition CS6

SteveG(AudioMasters) Jan 7, 2014 8:52 AM (in response to cs#)

It's recovery data, gathered automatically and it's stored in wherever you set your temp location to. Audition decides whether you need to recover data - users don't get to choose about that. Recovery data is lost when you restart Audition after a normal shut-down; it only does recovery from crashes.

It has also recently been discovered that if you recover from a crash, that you need to re-establish where you are recording new files to - otherwise they end up in the temp recovery area, not saved properly, and you will lose everything you recorded next time you restart. The devs are attending to this, apparently!

[ryclark]

Which version of Audition are you using? There have been several updates since CS6 but I am not sure if that problem has now been debugged and gone away. Anyway that bug was rather more serious for the loss of audio files rather than session ones.

Have you checked to see if there is any data left in your trashed .sesx file? It is basically only a text file so you should be able to read it with a text editor. If there is still data there somebody clever like SuiteSpot or Durin might be able to recover it for you depending on what went wrong. Presumably you still have all your audio files safe and backed up?

[DMcD Productions]

I am using CC 2014.

I emptied the trash after doing my brilliant backup so a complete computer search for all .sesx files confirmed it did not exists.

However, I found the temporary .sesx stash before you shut down Audition.  The path shows up if you try to Import>Application Setting into a multitrack session.  On a MAC it is in hidden files inside (user) LIBRARY>PREFERENCES>ADOBE>AUDITION>7.0  with a weird folder name. 

Yup, I am "oops".

[DMcD Productions]

This could be a RED ALERT for a bug regarding saving .sesx files.  Halfway through the re-edit of my lost session, I had some other sessions open and needed to stop so I saved all and closed all and quit Audition and shut down the computer.  When I started my computer again, one of the other .sesx files was gone and not in the trash.  I did not delete it by mistake.  Luckily I had exported the session so I had a copy, but this has now shifted from me screwing up to a mystery and possible bug issue.  If anyone has any thoughts, please let me know. 

[_durin_]

It has also recently been discovered that if you recover from a crash, that you need to re-establish where you are recording new files to - otherwise they end up in the temp recovery area, not saved properly, and you will lose everything you recorded next time you restart. The devs are attending to this, apparently!

This issue was fixed earlier this year.

As for an automatic backup of session files, this is a request that has come in a few times in the last several months, and has been submitted to our feature backlog.  I feel there's definitely merit to this, and we may be able to ensure these backups are stored locally AND on your Creative Cloud Files storage, providing a bit of "off-site" back-up in case of massive hardware failure.

But for now, Audition doesn't have a failsafe for "Oops, I deleted my session file and then deleted my backup recovery as well."  I'll add the comments from this thread to the feature request entry.