After spending an hour and a half getting a good guitar track recorded, I went to save it to disc as I usually do and when I went to play the track back, First I noticed that the metronome was acting weird -- very distorted with accents on the 1,3 and 4.
 
Then the guitar came in and the audio was badly distorted, unusable. So was the MIDI piano track.
 
There were only a couple of other tracks on this project so far and one plugin: Waves Abbey Road Plate, which I was using sparingly.
 
I tried saving it to another hard drive and it just saved the 'destroyed' project. The previous version of this project that I saved 2 days ago is still fine, but without the guitar track, and I can't record anything now without  fearing that it, too, will be rendered useless.
 
This stops me dead in my tracks for all my projects until I can get the issue resolved, so your feedback would be greatly appreciated.
 
Win 7 Pro
Intel Core i7-3770 @ 3.40 GHz, 3.40 GHz
16 GB RAM
64 bit op sys
Lynx Aurora 16 ADC w/ AES16e card
 

You should be able to save another backup copy of the saved version - I would copy that whole folder and give it a new name.  That allows you to open and work on resurrecting the needed guitar track into the saved version, and also keeps another copy of that safe, in case you had additional difficulties for some reason with the 'saved' version you made the backup from.
 
Then, if you open that saved version, you could import the guitar track audio clip(s) from your Audio folder from the 'destroyed' folder, wouldn't that get you back to roughly the same point you were at when whatever happened to destroy the other version?
 
Bob Bone
 

I copied and pasted the folder and it automatically got a new name: [project] - copy
 
Now, how do I "resurrect" the guitar track? There is no audio file in the audio folder past the previous session a couple of days ago.

I only have deadlines. And I'm working alone. Imagine a situation where you have a client and her producer.
 
"What happened to that perfect take?"
 
I have to know what happened and how to be able to prevent it from happening in the future.

I found out that I'd saved the guitar track in the previous version, so I didn't lose anything consequential -- maybe the metronome level or something.
 
Still I have to know what happened  and how to avoid it. What would make a project file go kerblooey when you save it?

how old is the Lynx Aurora you are using ?
and how is it set up (Driver wise) ?

I recently updated the drivers.
 
There haven't been any new ones in the past 11 months.

I just went back to the 'destroyed' project file.
 
I openen it, moved the cursor to start playback about halfway through, and it played back, no problem. Un-destroyed.
 
Then I saved the project and played it back, again no problem. Would this be somehow related to the fact that when I go to record a midi keyboard track, the virtual meter on the track shows a signal but I don't get sound until I start to play the track? Then it works for the rest of the session. That's another mystery, at least to me.
 
So, nothing was actually destroyed, but I can't really call this 'solved' if I'm still scratching my head.