[Rob Trujillo]

I’ve had this problem i think twice in the past 3-4 years. One time, the drive completely failed, nothing but clicks, so no way to recover anything without having the platters taken out (probably what you’ve found). The other time, the drive seemed find but all of the media/project files were just gone. I used recovery software, it took a day to do its thing, but eventually recovered everything.

Since that 2nd time, that can’t happen again, sounds like you know what it means to sink part of a lifetime into a project and have it all gone in a few nanoseconds… I set my system up expecting it to happen again some day. I made a batch file that executes every time windows starts and makes a new backup of all of the project files on a separate drive, and i keep backups of all of the media for important projects.

One thing i haven’t worked out- most cameras save media files with names like 0000.mts, 0001.mts etc. So if i loose a multicam project of say 10-14 cameras and manage to recover it, when i load it into premiere the first time after recovery, premiere usually needs to be pointed to where the media files are- it’ll say for example “where is the file 0000.mts”. But there are ten of those exact filenames in a 10 camera project, and each camera has its own folder. So how do i know which 0000.mts i should point it to? The obvious thing would be to rename each file with something more descriptive, but that would take hours.

There are batch programs that can do it all in a few seconds, but have read too many scare stories where it messes things up pretty bad, so haven’t been excited to do down that path. Maybe there is a simple solution that i haven’t found. I haven’t used CC much yet, maybe that’s been addressed..