Urgent – Audition crashed, all of my manual saves replaced by a much older file, only old autosaves

Report · May 18, 2023

I'm working on an .sesx file with two tracks (and two audio files) that both require a lot of close cuts.

Audition has been crashing fairly frequently, so I've been saving almost every time I make a minor edit – something like twenty to thirty manual saves in the last twelve hours. Today, it crashed, and I chose to reopen the files in the dialogue box that came up.

All of my work in the last few days is gone. Audition brought up a much, much older version of the .sesx file. This has happened before, so I searched for other versions of the .sesx – and none of them are even close to the most recent version of the file. I've lost days of work.

Autosave is set to every three minutes, and although I wasn't relying on it anyway, none of my autosaves are up to date. But all my manual saves have been for nothing! I just spent an hour talking to an Adobe specialist who told me to search for backups and save to the Cloud (would that have actually fixed anything, or would I just have two sets of the same broken files?).

I'm desperate. I've still got the files open, I've saved nothing, I'm scared to close Audition in case there is a way to recover any versions of the file from the last 24 hours. I'm desperate – this is a work project that is really high pressure. I use Adobe all the time and the specialist I spoke to said nothing about whether they know this happens or if it is being worked on or why it won't happen again. Does anyone have a work around???

How can I confidently use Audition when even rigorous saving doesn't fix the issue? I have been saving locally, but there's nothing wrong with my hard drive, and all the files seem to be where you'd expect them to be.

Report · May 18, 2023

When you say 'crashing', does Audition actually close down? If it does, then it will have produced crash logs, and when something like this happens, they are important, because they should provide a pointer to what it is in your machine that's causing this. And yes, I'm afraid it is in your machine; if this was common then everybody would be complaining about it, and they aren't. You should be able to locate the log files from Audition's Help menu, and it's pretty obvious which the crash log files are. It may be worth copying and pasting the text from the latest one into this thread - you never know...

Whatever you do, don't put your auto-saves on the cloud - that's no way to secure anything. If you really want to keep them there, make sure that it's copies you save, not the original files. This of course goes for all cloud saving - don't put originals of anything on it. As for the chances of recovery - I don't know. It rather depends on where you think you've saved them, and what the OS thinks it can do with that location... in principle, it's best to set your own location for backups, and not to rely on any default settings.

Audition is fundamentally stable, though - I regularly leave it on all day, and haven't had any sort of crash for ages. That's on a PC - can't speak for Macs.

Report · May 22, 2023

Thanks so much for your response!

I still don't know what the issue is, but there turned out to be a very simple solution – closing Audition and reopening the .sesx file.

Which sounds so obvious – but it was open in Audition and displaying at a much earlier state, and all of the autosaves were drastically out of date, and I was terrified that by closing the app I'd lose any chance of recovering my work. I spoke to two support staff who told me the work was gone forever – after your suggestion, I suggested the second take a look at the crash logs, but I was told nothing was wrong. I wouldn't be able to make sense of them myself.

So if anyone else encounters this problem, the fix itself was pretty easy. But I'm still disturbed that no one at Adobe seemed to understand the error or could tell me my work was recoverable, and I still have no idea why it happened. I am using a Mac, although I didn't have the same problems before I switched to this laptop in September. Here's hoping Adobe look into it!

Report · Sep 03, 2023

Sweet goodness. You have saved me a heart attack and a half. THIS! If you're googling this issue. Literally just closing and reopening worked.