chuckebaby
The CWAF doesn't delete anything on its own. You need to delete it. and the path is listed right there so not sure what you mean by that.

IIRC, I had to enter details (including the path, which was ignored) and start it. Once it finished I had to sort the lists, scroll down to where the files I should delete were sorted together, mark the ones to remove and hit the Delete key.

Could that be right? It was a long time ago.
I just remember it was no cakewalk.

chuckebaby
Do they needed to be updated ? sure they do. they are slow as all H. but buggy ? come on.

Well, one of the SPlat newsletters stated they'd fixed a bug. So I guess so.
 

chuckebaby
Even the op admitted he didn't look at the list of files he was deleting (basically admitted it was his fault).

After waiting for it to finish, I was naive to blindly accept the result and delete them.
 

chuckebaby
CWAF tool does what it should. Which is "Show you the files that are orphaned". its your choice to delete them.

It ignored the path (I see it and has since been fixed).

Two tools, both hopelessly out-of-date and constantly tripping up new users.
They should be removed or brought up-to-date.
"Save as - with files" does what people expect. How about just automating that?

Out of curiosity I just opened and started Clean Audio again.
After watching it scan for some minutes I realized

!!! THERE IS STILL NO STOP BUTTON !!!

So I hit the little red [x] in the top right corner and got the "Sonar has stopped working" message.

I closed the message and Sonar crashed.

I restarted Sonar and it said it couldn't find my interface so I rebooted my PC.

Im sorry to hear of your crash. I use both tools loyally and have excellent results.
Good luck

michael japan
I like the idea of getting a dedicated back-up soft. Please recommend.

To be really safe, you need a cloud backup as well. This statement will no doubt elicit the predictable "never trust the cloud" comments from stick-in-the-muds, but they're missing the point. The idea is not to replace physical backups with cloud backups, but to exponentially increase your security by having an off-location backup as well as your usual backup.
 
Whenever I've suggested making cloud backups on here, someone will usually chime in with "it's not safe! What if the cloud company goes bust, or suddenly decides to delete your files?" But apparently the fact that their external hard drive could be damaged, or stolen, or obliterated in a floor or fire doesn't occur to them. In such a case, you would be kissing the feet of your cloud backup provider for having another copy of your files. 
 
I use CrashPlan, as recommended to me by Cakewalk's own Noel Borthwick. It's a very reasonable yearly subscription, gives you unlimited storage (and they will even ship a hard drive to you for you to send back to them with your files if there are too many to upload), is fully encrypted for your security, and also (here's the good part) offers you a version history of all of your files, so that if for instance you experiment with a new direction in a mix and decide at some point that you've screwed things up and wish to revert to how things were at the start of the week, you can just open CrashPlan and view a list of prior versions to download. 
 
CrashPlan runs in the background and quietly backs up your files. I've never had any problems with it. And while I would never rely on the cloud as my only backup (I also store on an external drive), it's great to know that it's there in case something happens to my physical backups. 

In addition to an imaging cycle, data backups (raw file copies) of data files is easiest with xcopy or robocopy (for on-site backups), since these can be set to copy only newer files to the backup location. As a batch file, this makes the "data only" backup take less than a minute without unnecessarily cycling the drives. There are programs which will do similar for cloud storage (where bandwidth can be a serious concern).
 
For folks who like to watch a hard drive defrag, the above is a lackluster solution, since it has no blinking lights and goes too quickly.
 
Edit: I posted a summary of this a long time ago in this post.

THambrecht
I would recommend to anyone:
Go and buy a professional backup-software for 100$ that makes a automatic daily backup at the same time to an other harddrive (best is NAS). It makes NO sense if you make backups by yourself. Because you forget it and than this happens.

Yes.
 
I had the same thing happen, but fortunately everything was backed up.
 
That was the last time I used Clean Audio Folder. Yes, it was probably due to an error on my part, but I won't take the risk of using it when the same thing can be accomplished by Save As to a temporary folder, deleting the original, then copying what's in the temporary folder back to the original location.

This stuff used to cause me to lose sleep.
Finally gave in and now have Novabackup doing a nightly backup of my SONAR folder, weekly of my mixes and misc media files. I've even had to use it once and it all came back fine.
It's a huge backup archive but it gets cleaned out often ( don't need my nightly SONAR backups from 2015...)
 
I sleep better knowing one little misstep ( and I WILL do that somewhere) won't be catastrophic.
I still use the clean audio command...Just watch it closely and have a healthy respect/distrust for what it can do :)

I dunno, I never use Clean Audio or CWAF...just per-project folders, "Save As" when I think the project is done, then back those up to optical media (Blu-Ray, more robust than DVD or CD-ROM) and hard drives. I use the cloud for moving projects among computers, when travelling, or to provide access links to clients.

Just to assure everybody, everything was backed up in 2 places so I didn't lose anything. Thanks for chiming in. Interesting to find out that arguably one of the most tech savvy people on the forum (read your articles years ago in Electronic Musician) Craig Anderton backs up to Blu-Ray. I asked onlline about that before and got no hits. I was considering doing this for sometime. I have two dedicated external drives and use google drive as well. It was so shocking when I found out what happened that I just wasn't sure if every single wav was backed up. I was just amazed that I gave Sonar permission to delete years worth of mixes so started this thread. And more amazed that Sonar can actually do that. Interesting that some people say that beginners can get tripped up. I have been a professional musician for 50 years and it happened to me. Maybe I'm just dumb. Thanks for your interest in my problem and may the backups be with you.

Nice thing about using the Windows delete function is you can Undo the delete and get them all back.
 
For those not in the know, deleting files doesn't remove them but "tags" them by replacing the 1st character of the file name marking it as overwritable by the system. Recovery tools look for these and replace the 1st digit to it's original character making it visible again.

soens
Nice thing about using the Windows delete function is you can Undo the delete and get them all back.
 
For those not in the know, deleting files doesn't remove them but "tags" them by replacing the 1st character of the file name marking it as overwritable by the system. Recovery tools look for these and replace the 1st digit to it's original character making it visible again.

Please explain when you have a chance what you mean by undeleting. Thank you. Also, I tried using a recovery tool and though some files were ok, I would say a good half of them weren't (hundreds and hundreds of .wav)