Is there a current ardour.backup file?

He there,

I can’t seem to find a current ardour.backup file of my recent project. Ardour just crashed and upon reopening the changes of the last 30 Minutes or so were gone.

The only backup file of that project file I could find is two days old.

So (how) can I tell Ardour to backup more often? Like each 2 Minutes?

Thanks a lot,
Torsten

You can’t with the GUI. but you can edit ~/.config/ardour4/config and change

Option name=“periodic-safety-backup-interval” value=“120”

the value is in seconds and actually 2min by default. but ardour won’t do any periodic saves while rec-enable
is set. Also make sure periodic backups are enabled (“periodic-safety-backups” =1) that is also exposed in the Preferences GUI.

Anyway the real solution is to track down the crash and prevent it from happening. Can you reproduce it? Could you get a backtrace? http://ardour.org/debugging_ardour

He x42,

thanks for all your advices. I will check the config-file tomorrow. I didn’t know about the non-backup status while recording is enabled. Very helpful information.

“Can you reproduce it? Could you get a backtrace?” - I will try it tomorrow.

Thanks again,
Torsten

Some additional information: toggling global rec-enable and also rec-stop does an automatic save “.pending” (not “.backup”).

The reasoning for not doing periodic backups during recording or while preparing for recording is that those saves may interfere with the actual recording (additional disk i/o. plugins dumping their state,…) The session itself usually does not change while recording (only audio/midi data is added) so there should be no need to save.

dear x42:

what do you mean with:
“but ardour won’t do any periodic saves while rec-enable
is set.”
which rec-enable do you mean, is it this?

or this

and in which folder would i find the backuped sessions, in my original session-folder?
would there be after an hour work 30 new files, or do they overwrite??
THANKS IN ADVANCE
jo

dear x42:

what do you mean with:
“but ardour won’t do any periodic saves while rec-enable
is set.”
which rec-enable do you mean, is it this?
Option name=“latched-record-enable” value=“0”
or this
TransportControllables roll=“4” stop=“5” goto-start=“6” goto-end=“7” auto-loop=“8” play-selection=“9” rec=“10” shuttle=“21”
and in which folder would i find the backuped sessions, in my original session-folder?
would there be after an hour work 30 new files, or do they overwrite??
THANKS IN ADVANCE
jo

I meant the global record-enable in the transport bar (red button top right’ish).

When you engage that, Ardour does a backup “save” (pre-record) and will not do any periodic saves until it is disabled again.

The “latched-record-enable” option is the same as Preferences > Transport > Keep record-enable engaged on stop.

In Ardour there are 2 kinds or “backups”, every time you save (manually) the current session is renamed to “sesssion-name.ardour.bak” and the session is saved as “session-name.ardour”.
The periodic backups are files called “session-name.pending” and are used for crash-recovery only. Those files are also removed when ardour closes a session cleanly.

Dear x42,
thanks a lot for the time you spent, explaining me. The problem is, i had a crash, and he restored me the session 5 hours ago, i lost three hours work and did not find any backup session in the folder of the session itself; ill try with the setting you mentioned; but i think that this system of backup, ardour uses, is not immune against crashes; im using linux mint and sometimes he gives me, after a crash, the session 1 minute ago and sometimes, like yesterday, he restores me the session 5 hours ago, when i forgot to save MANUALLY; but this is not the backup-system we all want, dont we? saving manually cant be the ultima ratio!
(Though i think, the crashes itself are my fault, because of mixing the original wav-files from different storage-locations …)
Anyhow, thanks a lot!!!

@radiojo: do you think it is possible that you did, in fact, have global rec-enable engaged?