Our system has 10 Avid MC 3.5.1 systems networked to a Unity. We have one virtual drive set up for the users to capture to and one drive set up for project files.  For the longest time now we have been finding large amounts of media files to be offline.  Each machine has a file on the dedicated media drive that it captures to, ex avid  #1 puts its media fils in AVID1.1, and avid #2 in AVID2.1 all the way to ten. We found that all the media is still there and to get the media back all we have to do is delete the two database files and restart whichever avid is giving us the problem.  Then we found what causes it. When a user opens a project and begins to capture instead of adding the newly captured media to the already existing database, it overwrites the database file with one that only links the media just captured in that project, leaving everything else that has been captured on that specific machine offline.

Does anyone know how to prevent this from happening?

Thanks in advance.

pay no attention to my system specs below, those are for my home system...

bump.

What is your media file format? OMF or MXF?

In your dedicated media file folders (AVID1.1, AVID1.2, etc...), what is the average number of files in those sub-folders?

MXF, and lots. Our system is a Learning system and we wipe the servers every semester.  That said they start the semester with nothing and end with 300-400

swest26:

When a user opens a project and begins to capture instead of adding the newly captured media to the already existing database, it overwrites the database file with one that only links the media just captured in that project, leaving everything else that has been captured on that specific machine offline.

How have you determined that this is what is happening? It would be very strange indeed that database files would be "overwritten" in this manner. Please elaborate and describe what workflow and test analysis you used to arrive at this assessment.

Indeed, that is very strange behaviour. Like Larry I'm highly interested in how you discovered this.

For completely other reasons then yours (being portserver crashes) I do one thing. I reguraly check the media folders on the avid that loads the material in my setup. If this avid media folder reaches a "large amount", a completely subjective amount, I manually create a new media folder. In other words if I reached a avid1.6 folder, I manually create a avid1.7 folder. Avid automatically starts using this new folder.

If I face another portserver crash then I do not have to scan for a "long time" to get back and find all my media online. Till avid gets this portserver/network issue fixed it saves me a lot of scanning time. Maybe this would also help with your problem.

Maybe a nice feature request would be if we were able to adjust at which file amount avid creates a new media folder.