Last week, I’ve been recording live gig, two bands, around 4 hours of 20 tracks. Now I opened my laptop, started Ardour, opened the session from last week … and it was empty. Project folder contains 300KiB of data. Well, that won’t fit 20-track in 24b/48kHz, right?
The reason is pretty simple - I’ve probably shut down mixer before Ardour (an JACK). Then, JACK thread of Ardour got indefinitely stuck (if I remember correctly, GUII was partially responsible) so I had to forcibly kill it. I probably tried to press Ctrl + S before killing it.
But as outcome, all the data are lost. There’s nothing in lost+found directories. Bummer.
This should not be a rant - I would rather want to know what to do better as I believe Ardour does everything to preserve written data even if it crashes during recording. I don’t care about all the DSP settings, routing - that can be done again. But forcing two bands to play the great gig again is not possible
If it’s relevant, I’m using version in Arch repo, all data on ext4.
This sounds very wrong. Ardour is constantly writing data to disk as it is recorded, so for your entire session folder to only be 300kib doesn’t make sense for anything in Ardour’s control. Is it possible you have the wrong session opened? Or is it possible you used a temporary session that wasn’t saved yet to record and then it got deleted after the crash and a reboot?
Well, since realizing I have nothing, I’m more and more sure I just forgot to arm recording (the “main” recording button, tracks were armed for sure). This time it was not that important, especially because some video was also lost and not good quality.
So, I am probably just stupid and this post is as useless as it can be. Nevertheless, if recording ever started, will it retain data even in the case of the worst way of computer shutdown (of course, if the underlying filesystem withstands it), right?
