how can i recover deleted work?

[stza maa]

i was working away and saved every so often as i usually do, but i somehow managed to delete a track that i liked. when i was done i mucked around on the computer, cleaned it all up and deleted my garbage. when i next went into live i realized i deleted that track. i had a quick look but found nothing to help me. i tried re recording it for hours now and just can't seem to get it to sound the same.

is there anything i can do that i havnt found on the internet thus far?

[ollyb303]

Basically, no, sorry. It's gone.

Tough lesson to learn, but you'll maybe end up with something better in the end...

[whitecastle]

The number 1 rule of data recovery is stop WTF your doing and don't save any new data.

When a file is deleted, even if it's emptied from the trash, it's still on your drive. The OS updates the drives file tables to say "you can over write this space when you need to". That is why drives get fragmented - little open spots on the drive from constantly deleting and saving information. That is why you must stop what your doing - there's a possibility that the OS will over write the old data blocks with new data. But, sometimes you're lucky and those blocks are still recoverable.

If the OS doesn't use those blocks, you can recover the data.

By far the BEST application I have ever used to recover data is a Terminal/Dos app called TestDisk. It's free, has a great wiki and forum. Google it. I'm just wrapping up a full recovery of a 1TB drive that no system, PC or Mac, was able to even mount.

Last note: recovery always, always, always takes a lot of time. Terminal/Dos apps rarely hang, but chug away happily - they just never give you an indication of how far along they are. It always depends on how big the file is, how complex it's structure is,how fragmented your drive is.

Just make sure you give the app enough time to do it's job.

[ollyb303]

Data recovery is not going to work in this case since the version of the set with the lost track in it has already been overwritten with the version without it.

Might haves to check out testdisk though, I've a 1.5tb in a similar state.

[whitecastle]

Might haves to check out testdisk though, I've a 1.5tb in a similar state.

It'll take a while, but it'll work.

[Vios]

Look through all of the audio files that Live has recorded. Sometimes Live isn't good at cleaning up after itself, so you may have that audio file buried in the folder live creates for your project. Otherwise the file is overwritten and it's gone for good.

Otherwise you learned a good lesson as to why it's good to save a NEW copy of your project every time you make a major revision. It's very easy for your current copy to get messed up/corrupted/deleted/etc, so you always want a backup that you know you can bring back up to date in only a few hours of work if needed. Backup your hard drive too. If I was payed to do music production I would have a RAID 0/5 hard drive setup and have automatic daily backups of all of my work.

It's inevitable that this happens to just about everyone learning music production. Be thankful it was only a piece of one track and not an entire hard drive. Learn your lesson, nuff said.

[taoyoyo]

Something which might be worth looking into for the future is DropBox.

I've been using this for my design work and it's saved my bacon a couple of times now... basically you can recover deleted files that had been synced with 'the cloud' via their online browser version. Has worked great with InDesign files so I would imagine it would do the same with Ableton ones.

(The only thing I haven't liked about DropBox is all the synced folders have to be in a root DropBox folder... there is an alternative called SugarSync that allows you to select any folder in any position to sync)

[theengineerlady]

I see that Windows has a file recovery system. But unfortunately you have to set it up. I know I know it should come that way out the box also mac has the time capsule. Worth the pretty penny to invest in an external hard drive but for quick vital sessions a flash drive will do. More info here of course you can chose your OS and search for ways to back up your files via the magic google wizard. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... le-history

[Trappist49]

Ive had that happen as well, where I opened a recent project and clips were missing, notes were out of sync ect. What I suggest though since you didn't have any backups at the time, is sign up for Splice.com. Anytime you save an Abelton ( or any DAW) project, it saves that version without overwriting the previous. Its a lifesaver when you or the DAW messes up saving. Hope this helps!

(Ps. Its free as well)

[Stromkraft]

Revision systems
On the Mac, if Ableton decided to support the built-in OS revisions system that third party apps can support, this wouldn't be a problem. For Windows there would have to be something similar to also support, so that's may be one reason this never was implemented.

Splice isn't trustworthy as backup
While Splice may work in the described case, I think it's unwise to regard it as long-time backup. While unusual I've had some odd snafus added to projects when synced via Splice, like loss of a few links from clips to audio files and what not. I regard Splice as a sync service, not as backup or archiving.

File level backups
One major hurdle for any backup system is big files, such as audio, and how to save revisions of these. Say for instance you make a recording of 25 MB size. You use a backup system that is smart enough to only save a new copy of this particular file when you've made changes to the project and this file (file level incremental backups), which may be not that many times as Live in many cases leaves the audio as is and saves processing information instead in the .asd files. During working on a project you may do several hundred saves.

But say that this example audio file changes 4 times during the life cycle of the project. If you have a backup system that deals with changed whole files that means it will have been saved into your backup 4 times, each time slightly different, in total taking up a total size of 100 MB in the backup. Now say you have 20 audio tracks with the same properties roughly similar in size and you'll end up with 2 GB of data in total.

Byte level backups
If you instead use a system that do partial file saves or Byte level incremental backups, only the bits that are indeed unique in every new revision would be saved after the first one. Let's say the first revision changes 30%, the second 12% and the last 16%. All compared to all previous versions I'm pretty sure, so this could be quite massive changes I believe in the resulting audio.

That's, in this case, 25 + 7.5 + 3 + 4 = 39.5 MB instead of 100. That'd be more than 60 MB saved per track, giving us 39.5 MB * 20 tracks = 790 MB hitting our backup system. Of course this is only an example and your files and your operations on these may vary more or less than this. But the more changes you make and the more backups you run the more space will be saved in the backup as all of this accumulates with time.

This underscores, in my mind anyway, the importance of using such a system that can do partial file, or Byte level incremental, backups when handling media files.

I'd have to assume Splice does this on their servers for cost and efficiency reasons. Maybe it'd be a good idea for them to also sell software that can do what they do on their servers also locally? Because trusting a free service for backups does seem quite risky to me. Just look at the Gobbler fiasco.

[jonvalt]

Hey all - sorry to revive an old thread, but I had this exact problem, and I have a solution. I use CrashPlan for backups. It does versioning. I accidentally erased a track, googled how to recover, and found this thread. Then it dawned on me that Crashplan keeps ALL old copies of files. So I pulled up a copy of my .als file from last week, and sure enough the "missing" track is in there.

Crashplan only does "business" accounts now. As of today's date (3/30/2018) it's like $10/month or something.

Other services might work as well - what you're looking for is "versioning."

CHEERS!

https://imgur.com/a/FqhQq

[8E]

Hey all - sorry to revive an old thread, but I had this exact problem, and I have a solution. I use CrashPlan for backups. It does versioning.

The most of the cloud services offer versioning.

I use ChronoSync.
You can backup/version to any drive, locally, or via network via SFTP.
I simply sync one way, and apply in settings versions to 999, and than put the schedule every 5 minutes.

The biggest problem I face is that Live removes Undo when saved. I don't know any application that works that way. Logic Pro X even save Undo after you close the application, allowing undo steps of user's given number.

[Stromkraft]

The biggest problem I face is that Live removes Undo when saved. I don't know any application that works that way. Logic Pro X even save Undo after you close the application, allowing undo steps of user's given number.

Live 10.

[8E]

The biggest problem I face is that Live removes Undo when saved. I don't know any application that works that way. Logic Pro X even save Undo after you close the application, allowing undo steps of user's given number.

Live 10.

So, it works now, after save?
Or it works more advanced as LPX?

[Stromkraft]

So, it works now, after save?

Yes.

Or it works more advanced as LPX?

I have no idea as I haven't looked at Logic since version 8.