Andrew,
Your suggestion is a bit easier said than done (see below) but before I follow it, may I ask,
-- have you ever heard of this sort of behaviour before? i.e. BIAB or another program glitching and deleting itself?
-- if I do follow your advice, and the check reports that the disk is fine, what would you then suggest that I do?
This is a 2 TB, 7200 rpm USB drive. Before and after this incident, it has worked / still works fine when I copy to or from it, or read / write as I access and edit files which are on this disk (i.e. leaving them in place, not copying them to my PC's internal drive and). I've done this , for example, with files used by Word, Excel, Mixcraft, Sonar, and video editors (e.g. Vegas). I am able, via Kontakt, to have 10-12 instruments reading from this disk at once. It is only when using BIAB 2020 did this or anything like it happen.
To follow your suggestion, I'd have to copy apx 1.5 Tb from this drive to another. In theory it should mean simply selecting all files on the source disk, hitting Control + C, pointing in Windows Explorer to the empty destination disk, hitting Control + V, and waiting. In practice it never goes that smoothly -- often it involves babysitting the process, which sometimes fails, or for some reason forces me to copy certain individual folder / subfolders manually. It can become a long process involving creating detailed checklists to deal with these "stragglers".
Your advice to back up the disk first suggests that the chekdisk could mess up the disk. That would mess me up big time as far as music is concerned. I happen to have a spare 2tb hard drive to copy to, but it is only 5400 rpm, which I know from experience hits performance badly when working with Kontakt and audio apps. If the source disk you want me to check does get messed up in the process, I'll still have the files on the backup, but that's too slow for my purposes.
In other words, what you suggest would seem to require an inordinate amount of work and risk just to troubleshoot your program, which as mentioned is the only one I have behaving this way.
So again, have you actually seen this happen elsewhere, and if the disk check says the disk is fine, what would you advise next?
Just trying to avoid jumping down a time-consuming rabbit hole to determine why BIAB deleted itself while everything else on the disk remains intact and useable / editable from this disk. Bearing in mind that setting up BIAB from scratch again, including the installation of all the Real Tracks, also takes some hours; I'd prefer to minimise how often I need to do that
Hi,
I have seen files disappear before (though not the bb folder specifically) due to logical errors on a disk. I have certainly seen chkdsk fix errors on a disk (e.g. partition table errors) that have appeared suddenly, though in most cases there has been an obvious problem with the disk, whereas in your case everything else seems fine. However you CAN still run chkdsk - it is quick and easy, and not labour intensive at all. Just run chkdsk without any options "chkdsk <driveletter>:" It won't do anything to the disk, it will just tell you if there's anything that it CAN fix. Then optionally to fix it you could run it again with the /F option and that might take a minute or so. The reason I recommended backing up your personal files, because using this option /F will potentially make some changes on your disk, and so it could make matters worse for you.
Note that chkdsk has another option /R which I have never recommended, but you can read about that option. I think that has a higher potential to cause problems because it tries to repair bad sectors. Also it takes a REALLY long time.
I didn't know you were dealing with a 2 TB disk with a gazillion programs and files on it. Why don't you run the chkdsk without the options and let us know what it says? Then we can decide if you should proceed to backup your files, and do the chkdsk \F. You should probably have a backup of the material on that disk either way. Normally backing up an external disk to another external disk is straightforward, since at minimum all you need to do is copy the files from one disk to another in Windows Explorer. There are tools that can help you with this process that are inexpensive or free, but not required. If you have USB 3.0 disks plugged into USB 3.0 ports this can definitely make the process much less painful because it is so much faster. Before you start copying, turn off the power saving features of your computer so that nothing goes to sleep if you walk away from it for a few hours while it's copying.