All recording done in the past six hours vanished!

I was working on a client's album this evening and we opened and recorded acoustic guitars in six different sessions. I left the stuido for an hour or so and when i came back I opened the first of the six sessions. Much to my surprise, none of the acoustic tracks were there. I then checked the modified date of the session and it said 8/15. It was like we hadn't recorded anything in that session. The same holds for the other five sessions. I saved every session while we were recording at least ten times. I have scoured my compter for the missing tracks and they are not there. How is it possible to save six session on 8/28/06, come back a few hours later and have each session listed as last modified on 8/15/06? I was recording onto a Lacie 160 External Hardrive. I am running PTLE 7.0. I have a G4 1.25 Dual Processor. Nothing like this has ever happened before and it is very unnerving. Any light any of you can shed would be much appreciated. Thanks, Darren

The only time I have ever had something similar happen was on a PC when it crashed through a record and the data from that session was corrupted. If you recorded and saved the sessions they will be on the HD somewhere even if the sessions have lost the addressing. Do a search for all .wav files eventually you will come across them. I wish I could offer you a little more hope than that, but as long as you saved the sessions the data will be on the HD.

Is there any chance that while you were away your computer went to sleep, or was put to sleep? Anyone hot-swap a firewire device?

Doh - man, that sucks. You might want to try running Disk Warrior on your audio drive (the Lacie), and then check the recovered files folder. Disk Warrior totally rebuilds your drive's directory and works amazingly well - it has saved system drives I've had that wouldn't even mount. If you plan on using Disk Warrior on your system drive, however, make sure you are using the correct version for the version of the OS you are running (running pre-Tiger versions of Disk Warrior on a Tiger operating system will totally screw it up) and it should be noted that after running Disk Warrior on your system drive, journaling will for some reason be disabled (it's simple to re-enable via Disc Utility, Console or Drive Genius). Niether of these last points really matter if your only running it on your audio drive though - it's well worth a try and takes just a couple minutes on non-system drives.

I did a search for all .wav files and all.ptf files on my computer and external drives and nothing that was done in that block of time is there.

The Computer did not go to sleep and none of the firewire drives were hot swapped. I also ran disk warrior on the drive and it said that the drive was exactly as it should be. I'm at a complete loss here.

The Computer did not go to sleep and none of the firewire drives were hot swapped. I also ran disk warrior on the drive and it said that the drive was exactly as it should be. I'm at a complete loss here.

If you want any chance of recovering the data, you should stop using the drive immediately and run a utility like Data Rescue to see if it can locate any of the missing data. It very well could be that the drives volume directory got corrupted in some way and does not have info on where those files are, even though the files are there. Data Rescue (or other data recovery utiliities) bypass the volume directory and look directly on the drive for file headers and usually can recover anything on the drive that has not been written over yet.

Wow, that's an odd one... I can't speculate HOW it might have happened, but if the OS's date got changed while you were working the audio files would be dated 8/15 not 8/28. Have you searched for files dated 8/15? Scott