michael japan

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.

In Windows Explorer, after you delete something you can "Undo" to bring the files back.
It pretty much works in the same way the windows clipboard does. There is also an Undo button right on the toolbar in Windows Explorer.

chuckebaby

michael japan

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.

In Windows Explorer, after you delete something you can "Undo" to bring the files back.
It pretty much works in the same way the windows clipboard does. There is also an Undo button right on the toolbar in Windows Explorer.

I see. Yea, I don't think that works if you shut down your computer and don't notice that you deleted something until the next afternoon.

The size allocated to the Recycle bin plays into the OPs issue, since if a "delete" is requested that exceeds this (rather easy with audio files), a pop pup would occur (if done soley at a Windows level) to the effect of "These files exceed the volume of the Recycle bin, would you like to permanently delete them?" If yes, the "undo" is not tracked by Windows, which essentially protects those files from being overwritten. In that case they can still be recovered if not overwritten, but there is no "Windows oversight" to ensure they are not (which is essentially all the Recycle bin does).
 
Once Windows has been taken out of the loop, a third party tool is the easiest solution to recover deleted files. That link is a good resource, but as Karyn mentioned, installing anything on the computer to restore them risks overwriting them as well (i.e. installing the tool on a USB drive from a different computer is less risky).

Karyn
Would it be ironic if installing the deleted files recovery utility overwrote the deleted files you want to recover?

lol, better run it from a disk or usb drive...

michael japan

chuckebaby

michael japan

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.

In Windows Explorer, after you delete something you can "Undo" to bring the files back.
It pretty much works in the same way the windows clipboard does. There is also an Undo button right on the toolbar in Windows Explorer.

 
I see. Yea, I don't think that works if you shut down your computer and don't notice that you deleted something until the next afternoon.

No but if you had used the windows delete routine they would still be in the recycle bin where you could still retrieve them after you shut down and restart the computer. It's when you empty the recycle bin and then shut down that you'll need 3rd party recovery.
 
Here's a quote from one: "iCare Data Recovery Pro enables all users to recover files no matter how they got deleted as long as the files are not overwritten. All types of files are recoverable whether they are deleted permanently from hard drive partition or Recycle Bin."

Sorry to read about this mishap. Hopefully you can get all your music back. However, Sonar did exactly what it was designed to do, in this case. The problem is that it was designed a long time ago.
 
Before we had per-song folders, Sonar (or Cakewalk Pro Audio as it used to be called) would store all your wave files in one dedicated folder, entirely separate from your project files. The idea is that every wave file in that folder had been created by Cakewalk at some point, in the course of working on a song. Sometimes you'd record some audio, then delete the take, and Cakewalk wasn't smart enough to know that it could then delete the audio. Sometimes you wouldn't want it to, anyway - perhaps you might have referenced the same piece of audio in 2 different projects, if you had 2 different versions of the same song, for example.
 
What Clean Audio Folder would do, is go and remove all the audio files from this shared folder that were not currently being used by any Cakewalk project. This meant two things:

1. It would have to search every folder of all of your hard drives to find every Cakewalk project, in order to see what audio each one references. This is why it takes so long. It doesn't only search project folders; in fact, it's for the opposite case, where audio is stored completely separate from the project.
2. Once it has that list of which audio files your Cakewalk/Sonar projects are using, it can 'safely' delete every wave file that is in the audio folder and which is not on the list, because it assumes every wave file in the folder was made for a Cakewalk/Sonar project at some point. If it's not on the list, it's no longer being used by Sonar, so it's fair game to be deleted.

Your mistake was telling Sonar that your folder entirely dedicated to Sonar project audio was actually your entire D drive. It was intelligent enough to spot that those files were not referenced by your projects, but it's not intelligent enough to realise that many of the files in there were not created by Sonar in the first place.
 
 
For backups, I personally use Crashplan, which will automatically save all your data to a remote server. It's not free, but at times like this, it's almost indispensable.

Kylotan, thank you for the excellent explanation.

Hello. I'm new to cakewalk. Just practicing getting to know the system.
A curious thing happened to me last night. I had a few slivers of songs, noting important. I had asked about methods of cleaning unused audio, edits, etc. The 'clean audio' answer came up.
Still not really knowing how to use it, I dug into that option as deep as I could go. There was nothing I could lose by doing it. No real music. Only testing of mics, levels, a few harmonies. No big deal. If for some reason I lost every scrap it wouldn't bother me and I'd learn from it the easy way. I'm not at the system but from what I recall there's quite a few options in that area. I saw the program scan and return a list. I know now that I wasn't reading in cakewalkish. The fact that it read 'these are all cakewalk files' or something to that effect, apparently wasn't so.
I honestly don't know that what I did created my problem or that it was just time for the problem to happen, but, today when I went to use it, windows explorer would not open. Nor would the recycle bin (win 7). A system restore fixed the issue, but I have a feeling something in that section might have done that. I just have no idea what. Or as I wondered, was it time for Windows to screw up. I just recently did a fresh reformat and install of windows along with cakewalk. Could the scan have returned something that when deleted would've taken windows explorer with it?
Now it's time to be a little more careful. Learn the meaning of the word recurse...