Opening a Library Backup - media offline?

Today we had an issue with a Library that became corrupted- FCP crashed while editing metadata on a Multicam clip, and upon relaunch FCP would hang when trying to open that Event within the Library. We had a Library Backup that was only a few minutes old, so we made a copy of that and opened it. FCP asked us to save a destination for the new Library it was creating from the backup and we were up and running.

Except...

All the media was offline. I went through the process of relinking everything (it was a BIG Library) and eventually it was all back, but is this normal behavior? Is there something different I could have done to open a backup and have the media intact?

We work with our media on an Xsan and the active Library on the local drive, if that helps at all.

Thanks in advance,
Bill

I figured it out.

Thinking this through it occurred to me that I could open the last working copy of the Library (in this case, the copy that was saved back to the Xsan last night), and while that's open I would choose File->Open->From Backup.

Boom.

All the media was linked properly and we are good to go.

Just an FYI if anyone runs into this corruption issue. And always make regular copies of your active Libraries! Time Machine would work nicely in this scenario.

Bill

Hey Bill,

Thank you for posting your solution. Keeping Libraries at client level on a shared storage workflow also involves keeping good track of your Backups, as you have experienced.

FWIW: In the past days we have been testing a new FCP X workflow with 10 x 10GigE clients for editing/finishing plus up to 24 single GigE clients for pre-cutting/reviewing over a single 89TB shared storage network (expandable to 1 Petabyte). We have been keeping all Libraries at the Share-point level (on the SAN) and the initial results look very promising with constant 200-300 MB/s on each 10GigE client and 100 MB/s on each single GigE client. Keeping the Libraries on the SAN eliminates any possible pitfalls with media management or project transfers (no need for Transfer Libraries) and it allows for extremely fast and easy collaboration especially with big and complex collaborative productions. There will be more tests in the coming week, I will keep you updated.

- Ronny