Thanks, Black Magic, for costing me a month of work.

Was having the "media offline" error for cached render files. This time, all the "normal" fixes weren't having any effect (checking the file path, manually deleating cashed files - how the heck do you get 300 GB of render files on a project that only has 150 GB worth of footage!??)

Well, somehow, my hard drive got corrupted. When I restarted my computer, it performed an automatic disk check and repaired the disk... And now my entire video AND audio project folder are simply gone. Not all my folders are gone - just the ones that held all my most vital projects.

I have backups of most of my older stuff on other hard drives, but none of these most recent projects. I take normal precautions - saving often and saving undee different file names before making big edits in case project files get corrupted; but never have I EVER seen such a catastrophic failure in data loss because of one software.

I can't believe I was tricked into thinking this was professional level software.

Anyway... Has anybody else experienced this kind of data loss, and have you had any luck in recovery? I am running Windows 10 (top of the line specs), GLYPH dual RAID hard drive (only about 3 years old, temperature and humidity controlled room), using Resolve 16. At least, I WAS using it - I will never touch it again after this. Nor ever touch Black Magic hardware for that matter.

[Peter Chamberlain]

Let's see if we can help recover your work.
Do you still see the projects in the project manager?
If you load a project, are folders and clips placed in the media pool, even if offline?
If the clips are offline, do you still have these on a media drive?
Is that drive listed in DaVinci Preferences, media storage?

Is all those clips are in the media pool and on the drive, the Resolve relinking can be used to auto link clips. Select the media pool master folder, right click and select to relink clips, then select the folder where the media is.
Agree if the prompt want to do a deep search.
Then manually chase clips that didn't link.

This sounds like drive hardware failure, it's just coincidental that you were using Resolve at the time.

Windows "repairing" your drive will mark sectors it finds bad as unusable, which might explain the data loss.

Cached files sizes are dependent on what format you're generating - check your project settings. It is expected for cached file sizes to exceed the camera footage files, since cameras usually output to compressed H.264/H.265. Once cached/proxied/optimized they are converted to files with less compression, that can play back more smoothly.

Are you using Raid 0 or raid 1?
Perhaps is this the question!

Dirk PEL

FWIW - sounds like a HDD failing. Have never heard of Resolve corrupting a drive like that.

backups - export DRP's regularly - we export ours to a separate drive from our main media drives and we export sometimes several times a day if we are making tricky corrections, vfx or big changes.

we also backup our media drives everyday, automated backups.

good luck with the recovery. We've had some that got us nothing and some that recovered the entire drive so fingers crossed.

Was having the "media offline" error for cached render files. This time, all the "normal" fixes weren't having any effect (checking the file path, manually deleating cashed files - how the heck do you get 300 GB of render files on a project that only has 150 GB worth of footage!??)

If you work on heavily compressed source from prosumer cameras and use as cache/render format eg. EXR then you ration can be eg. 50:1 not just 2x as you described. Nothing special or unusual. You need to learn and understand what is happening.

Resolve has nothing to do with your issue.
It’s just drives failure. You need to use raid1/5/6 which protects you against single (or more) drives failures.
If you used raid0 then single drive failure ends with nightmare as yours.

You never seen such a thing? Of course as this happens randomly. You can work years without a problem and then day comes and your media is gone. Our 16 drives raid5 worked 6 years until 1 of the drives did fail. Other one had dead drive within first 3 months from installation. It’s just a random thing. Sooner or later every drive can die.
If you protected yourself properly then you would have no issue. Simple media re-linking would solve everything.

One more important thing. Resolve stores projects in database which at the end is also a file on your disk. You should regularly backup it ( there is an option in Resolve for it) as if your drive dies then this database file may get corrupted which would mean loosing all Resolve projects.
You lost just some of the master files so all editing work is still preserved in Resolve project file which is ok. Backup it immediately.