Issues with external drive paths

Cubase
,
#1

Earlier today I was transferring up some projects on my old computer to my new computer. I was opening some of them to double check the contents, but in order to do so I had to connect my external hard drive that has most of my samples and libraries. Issue is now that I’ve connected said hard drive back to my new computer, Cubase is acting like the paths on the hard drive have changed. When I open a project it’s prompting me to locate files and the favourites I had set in the Media Bay seem to be disconnected as no files are showing up when I click on them.
Any way to fix this or do I have to go and manually redo everything??

Not sure if it matters, but my old computer is a Mac while the new one is Windows. Hard drive is exFat format.

#2

Hi,

Use File > Back up Project function, please.

#3

Yeah I’ll definitely do this going forward, but is there any way to reconnect the path’s in my Media Bay’s favourites or do I have to remake them all?

#4

Hi,

When the Missing File dialog comes, you can point Cubase, where to search for the missing files. But you have to do this per project.

#5

yeah this seems to be the case with the Media Bay too. Ended up just redoing all my favourites. Wish I knew why this happened in the first place though. I didn’t change anything on my external, yet Cubase is acting like it’s a completely different hard drive. It’s frustrating and time consuming to fix it all so hopefully whatever caused this doesn’t happen again…

#6

Hi,

From Cubase point of view (actually from IS point of view) it is completely different drive. Windows and macOS have different way of external drive handling and the paths.

#7

So will this happen every time I connect my external drive to my Mac and then to my PC? I thought having it formatted to exFAT would make computability a non-issue but if seems like I’ll need to clone my external…

#8

Hi,

I’m afraid it will always happen. I mean if you have a look to the path, on Windows it’s always like:

  • F:/folder 1/Folder 2… (where F is the drive name)

On Mac it always looks like:

  • Volumes/MyDrive/Folder 1/Folder 2
#9

Yeah they definitely use different paths, but shouldn’t the above example only effect sessions created on one OS and opened in the other? Even if my external drive path becomes Volumes/My Drive/etc… when connected to my Mac, it would return to F:/folder/etc… when reconnected to my PC no? Could it also maybe be an issue with the Meday Bay Database being overwritten? I’m honestly not well versed in how the database works, but if it’s stored on the external drive itself then maybe the change in paths from the OS is messing it up?

#10

Hi,

But here you do the switch from one OS to other, if I understand you right… So then yes, the problem occurs. Or am I wrong?

#11

I did state in my original post that I was transferring from one to another, but my problem wasn’t those particular sessions. The problem is that after I was done working on those older sessions (on my Mac), I plugged my external back into my PC to work on a more recent project that was created on said PC. All the external files in this session were imported from my external via the Media Bay, on my PC. My Mac was never involved with this session. Despite that, Cubase didn’t recognize the paths, even though I haven’t changed anything since I last worked on it. I also had a bunch of locations on my external set as favourites in the Media Bay, but those were disconnected too. Is it possible that the external drive letter was changed? It’s assigned to E right now, but I don’t recall if it was something else before. I’m still new to Windows so not sure if that’s a thing when you have multiple hard drives and usb sticks inovled.

#12

Hi,

I see, now I got it, sorry.

As far as I know, the disk drive name is assigned on the fly. So if you plug any other external driver first, the E name would be assigned to this other drive. If you would plug you drive simultaneously, it would assign name F. At least if I remember right.

#13

Ah maybe that was the issue then. I’ll keep an eye on that in the future. Thanks for the feedback!