Tracks/Banks Deleted

i’ve followed the forum pretty regularly for the last year or two but i don’t think i’ve seen anyone with this issue…and i’ve done some searches over the last couple days, but not seeing any previous mentions turn up… has anyone run into the issue of multiple Tracks and/or entire Banks of Tracks just…disappearing?

on more complex songs i’ve been sorting different portions of the song into different Banks of Tracks…so part A of the song will all be using Tracks 1-16 in Bank A. well i’ve been building up a song for the last month+, returning to it regularly, and got it to where it was 95% complete and ready for a performance/recording. Banks A, B, C, & D were all being used, most Tracks had something or another on it. well i put it away for about a week to re-approach it, and in that time i worked on other songs in other Projects on the Pyramid, and on other gear. i of course had saved this first main Project multiple times. many, many times. at no point had any of the work i’d done just disappeared. and though i would delete or move around some Tracks to different Tracks and to different Banks, at no point did i do a mass deletion of Tracks…however when i returned to this Project a few days ago, Bank A is perfectly as i left it, all Tracks as they were. but Banks B, C, & D have just vanished. there’s nothing at all saved in them anymore (no FX, no MIDI routing changes i’d made, nothing)… and i was livid. i’ve calmed down somewhat and been searching my brain trying to remember if i did something strange, and i’ll list the only things i can think of below…but my main question is: has anyone seen this behavior happen? is this a known issue and i’ve just run into at a time that happens to destroy hours & hours & hours of work?

and before anyone asks, i didn’t backup the Project, of course. felt no need to as i’ve never had this sort of thing occur.

so here’s the only things i can think of that could’ve possibly caused some issue:

  • for the aftorementioned song i’m using the Elektron Rytm for drums, sequences all on the Rytm entirely though, nothing but clock was coming from the Pyramid to the Rytm…i did a lot of copy/paste/delete on the Rytm’s patterns. Rytm’s banks/patterns are divided up very similarly to the Pyramid’s
  • i transferred sysex files onto my Elektron Rytm. i did this through a direct USB cord from my laptop to the Rytm, but the Pyramid may have been turned on and hooked up via MIDI. (Pyramid MIDI out > Rytm MIDI in).
  • in a different project on the Pyramid i was using a separate MIDI sequencer to send notes/CC values/MIDI info to the Pyramid where the Pyramid was the slave, etc.

none of those things were my first time doing any of that…but they’re the only things i can imagine possibly could’ve caused some issue, however i don’t think any of them are likely (hell, i doubt any of them really are even possible that they could’ve deleted Banks of Tracks in the Pyramid!) but i felt it worth mentioning.

so, without thinking clearly as soon as i first noticed ‘oh shit, my Tracks on Banks B, C, & D are all gone!’ i immediately reloaded the project. if there was any chance of recovery because of a bug i’m guessing that killed it right there…so i’m pissed over all but pretty accepting of the fact that my work is surely all just disappeared. i’m more concerned and taking the trouble to post all this here to see if it’s something anyone else has seen, and if not then maybe contacting Squarp for a bug report (in which case i’d be typing all this out anyway! ha)…but ultimately i’m concerned with making sure there’s no way this ever happens again. i can’t back up the device every time i turn it off, that’s just not going to happen…so prevention and confirming reliability is key here. and, as i’m assuming this is either an obscure bug or just weird combination with some amount of user error, i want to know what the hell i possibly could’ve done wrong to have caused this (as i at no point deleted 3 Banks in this project!).

What could perhaps explain is a busy track appearing in the middle, which causes Pyramid to run out of memory while loading the project, and everything towards the end appears lost. There should be a marker on the screen (exclamation mark iirc) if this is the case. Of course there could be bugs too (eg around out-of-memory handling, it sounds like a large project anyhow), there’s no telling…

Take a deep breath (and a backup) now, and have a look at the project files on a computer. That’ll tell you whether the work is actually there or not. The rest depends on that.

And yeah, nobody cares about backup recommendations until something like this happens. I guess quite a few of us have probably been there on way or the other (not talking of the Pyramid specifically)

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best bet is to contact Squarp via contact page and they can check your project.

I hightly doubt any ‘action’ caused the tracks to ‘disappear’ e.g. other projects/sysex.
only action I could think externally influencing a project would be related to sdcard itself… e.g. a failure on the card, or manually deleting overwritting files etc.

anyway, all this I suspect is pure speculation… so we should move on :slight_smile:

lets have a few facts… that might prove interesting/useful about whats stored on the sdcard.

BACKUP folder on sdcard

there is a backup folder on the sdcard.
each time you save the project it moves last project to this directory.

so we have ONE version of each project in the backup
implication : important note
if you notice your project is ‘wrong’ NEVER save it … you will destroy your working backup

I think the intention behind this is simple.
your project is working lovely.
you save it - all seems ok
the next day (or whenever) you come back, its screwed.

you can go to the backup to pull back the last successful save
(we know it was successful, as you’d previously loaded it)

notes:

  • you will lose the last ‘sessions’ work. (of course!)
  • this might not help if the sdcard failed.
  • this is done ( I believe) as a move, so should not be prone to failure.
  • if you delete a project the backup is not deleted

what is a project?

lets consider your failure in terms of how a project is stored by the pyramid

a project is a folder containing

  • a core.pyr file - meta data about the project
  • a midi file per track - holding midi events

so this means if you go look at your sdcard you can see if the midi track data is gone or if its just the meta data (core.pyr) is incorrect.
(my suspicion is you’ll fine the midi files are still there)

Core.pyr,
actually talked about this a little in this thread

this file details all the track layouts, fx used …everything that is not midi event data.

the core.pyr file is actually a text file , so you can view it
(make sure you COPY it to view it, if you accidentally make a change it will very likely become unreadable)
its not a particularly complex file format, even without knowing it, you should be able to see if your ‘tracks’ still exist in it or not… and what state they are in.

so from all of this you can determine
a) has the midi data been deleted
b) does the core.pyr still have entries for tracks.


hopefully, this should give you some info…
and is also why I suggest contacting Squarp, as if they see your project, they will likely be able to
a) determine if there is a bug in loading project
b) if something is corrupt, determine what is salvagable.

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perhaps there is some hope then! i don’t think i’ve saved it since this, so this evening i’m going to dig out my SD card reader and try and do what you’ve described. hadn’t considered this too likely, but i’m hopefully wrong there :slight_smile:

i had considered that momentarily, but despite using a lot of Tracks, most of them didn’t have a ton of events and weren’t too long. some were longer, and about half had two or more Patterns tho, so maybe all of it added up to near the limit? will see more about this.

appreciate suggestions from both of you :slight_smile: will follow up as soon as i can.

if you make a zip of the project file and upload it somewhere we could take a look.

i don’t think that’s necessary as now i’m quite sure it’s all gone. i don’t know if i saved it after noticing the Banks disappeared, but it’s possible. i’ve never delved into the .pyr files before, other than seeing a few bits posted here in threads…but it’s relatively straightforward and easy enough to decipher…

in the Project i’ve had losses in, the main file shows only the first 16 Tracks of MIDI files that i’d used, labeled accordingly as track2, track3, …track16, etc., whereas other projects with multiple Banks shows clearly Tracks saved as MIDI files called track17, track40, etc.
this is the same not just for the main folder containing all Projects saved and this Project in particular, but also the Backup folder. I’m guessing the Backup folder just saves the last copy of a file, so if you’ve got a loss/issue like mine then you’ve got the main and then the most recent save before it as the Backup? given how seemingly miniscule these files are, i’m a bit surprised there’s not a few saves back implemented. that could be a headache for Squarp to program perhaps…? but it could be a life saver for poor sods like me… :cry: or at least an option to save the last 5 in a Backup, last 10, maybe? idk. obviously not ideal, just thinking out loud. and wishing they’d have saved me here! lol

speaking of, i’m still going to contact support and ask if there’s anything else perhaps. and of course more so going to chat with them to hopefully figure out what could’ve caused this in the first place. i’ll definitely report back here with any further updates, if for no other reason than just for anyone else in the future who might run into something similar and comes around here searching.

thanks for your help so far ttbear and pmat :slight_smile: it’s appreciated.

edit: was going to say there’s not even any residual information in the Backup save of the Project in question…no MIDI routing, MIDI info, FX, anything, besides from what seems to be bog-standard info one would get with an unused track (showing the assumed MIDI routing it loads as standard) …it’s basically like those three Banks were 100% never touched, even though they were definitely used.

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the backups would also required the midi files, not just the pyr file - to be useful, so that increases the file.
however, midi files are also very small considering the size of sdcards we use :wink:

i think a rotating backup is a good idea, and if the backup is working as a ‘move’ (rather than copy) which id hope it is, then this would make rotating very simple (1->2->3->4->5),
Id do it in a folder structure, so something like
backsups->project name-> backup 1, backup 2.

so definitely put in a feature request for it via contact form

however, as you say, the other important issue here is what exactly happened, and how.

what surprises me in your example is that the midi files have disappeared - I guess this means at some point core.pyr indicated the track had been deleted so it either deleted the midi files, or stopped moving them to backup?
… but yeah, its an area that would be useful to review with Squarp directly via email.

that’s my thinking, yeah. since the BACKUP folder is just nested inside the main folder, and i’m assuming only creates a backup when a new copy of a Project is saved, i’d guess (not a programmer so i could be very wrong here!) you could just have that re-iterate 5 or 10 or however many times you’d like, just nested BACKUP folders so if something crazy happened you could always go pull a previous version. i’m sure there’s a good reason that’s not implemented that i’m not aware of…maybe the Pyramid hardware just isn’t good at doing that kind of copy/rewrite/pasting or something, idk. the file sizes themselves are so small tho, i can’t imagine that’s the hold up.

good thing is i realized my laptop has an SD card reader built in it (duh, shows how much i have a need for such a thing) so i’m going to try and get in the habit of just backing up every week.

yeah…i mean i may have saved again in my initial panic, as from what i can tell the main and the backup (of the Project in question) are exactly the same.

Squarp has responded already and is looking at the backup files i sent over, maybe we’ll know more after going back and forth with them trying to recreate/understand what could’ve happened.

I just experienced a similar issue. Saved a track last time yesterday (not that complex, I used 6 tracks, built up 12 sequences), loaded it today and all tracks are gone but Track1. I will check the mentioned backup folder if anything can be rescued…

Cheers SF

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interesting! sorry to hear that of course. hope you were able to find the lost tracks in the backup, definitely let us know if there’s any evidence or anything you think might’ve triggered such an occurrence.

Hi, here is what I found out. After checking the files on the SD card it appeared that the missing tracks have been physically gone. Track01 was still there & working, Track02 was there but corrupted (0 bytes). All tracks were sucessfully backed up so I could save my song. I suppose something went wrong while the last saving attempt. I made rotating backups but also saved the project under its original name with no issues.

Cheers SF

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that is interesting. the Squarp rep i’ve spoke with about my issue has mentioned it might be a good idea to make sure my SD card has been properly formatted so as to lessen the possibility of corrupting saves, i assume…so that might be something for you to consider going forward.

Good advice. I used the SD card as it was delivered; it worked out of the box when I started the Pyramid for the first time. It would be good to know what “properly formatted” exactly means; “format your SD card with your computer (“FAT32” with Windows, “MS-DOS FAT” with Mac) before using it with Pyramid” is the only bit I could find concerning the card format.

this is the one suggested by Squarp to me: SD Memory Card Formatter - SD Association

they’re of course not guaranteeing anything i’m sure, but SD cards are not something i’ve often used so i’m unfamiliar with their general reliability/etc.

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