Missing media file

Hello all,

Three times over the last half year, I've experienced a very alarming situation when opening a project file - and upgrading to Leopard (OSX 5, not Snow yet) and FCP 7 hasn't seemed to change it. I've discovered when I start up FCP at the beginning of the day, the largest file in my project capture scratch folder - I do trailers, so it's always the feature QT file - is missing. FCP can't find it, and when I search in Finder it's nowhere, not even in the trash. If I hadn't done a media backup, I'd be completely screwed. This has occurred on different media drives. Any ideas out there? Should I run Disc Warrior or Tech Tool Pro? Any other suggestions? Thanks in advance for your help.

That's very scary. Is the amount of disc space you have correct for the files that you can see? I mean, is the file there somewhere but invisible, or just plain gone?

It's just plain gone. The media drive doesn't recognize the missing file size (in other words, I now suddenly have more space on the drive as if I had emptied the trash...!).

I would suspect an unstable storage drive. Take the drive in question out of the equation entirely and see if the problem still persists.


www.derekmok.com

There was a random bug like this waaaaaaay back in FCP 3 I think, but I haven't heard of it for years. I'm going to go with Derek and say the disc might be suspect.

I'm of the same mind, but have a couple of thoughts. If you haven't emptied the trash since your discovery, have a look in there. And Disk Warrior may help here, if the file is "missing" because it fell out of the directory for some reason. I.e., it may be still there but the file structure isn't recognizing it, and that's something Disk Warrior addresses. Still suggests a failing disk, but you may be able to recover it and put it somewhere else. I'd be curious to know what you find.

Scott

Thanks to all for your advice. I'll run Disc Warrior and see what happens. The problem has happened on three different drives, so I'll be curious if it's really the current media drive itself that's the problem.