[Ardour-Users] So many lost midi files

[Vincenzo Ciancia]

Dear Paul,

I was lucky today (I found a old copy of the session, with the solos,
in another distribution's installation that I had forgotten about). I
will now start using btrfs snapshots to save my work continuously, and
keep using ardour. If there are ways to collect more information for
debugging purposes, I can try to do this.

What I noticed today is that if I rename a session directory, all the
midi files therein are considered "lost"; that's due to absolute paths
in the .ardour file. But this can't be always true, since I am pretty
sure I renamed and copied sessions around, and that worked well.
Maybe this can be related to the midi file loss? I did NOT frequently
open copies of the same session, and definitely not in the last week;
I also checked and there is no reference to other copies of the
session in the .ardour file of one where the loss happened, so I am
doubtful but nevertheless...

It would be good to change the code (for debugging purposes) so that
whenever a deletion is invoked, a stack trace of the program is saved.
Then you could debug it!

But what can be a reason to delete a file, anyway? I think any call to
"unlink" could be replaced with "move to trash, together with any
relevant metadata". Then in the "missing file" dialog, if the file is
in the trash, an option could be activated to recover the file from
there (and that would be symptom of a bug!).

Vincenzo