So I woke up this morning to work on things, and was trying to fix an activation issue with the latest omni update 2.8.5f (moria FWIW), and found that MOst of(but not all) of my vst3s were missing from commonfiles/vst3.
I was thinking that maybe I had dragged them by acident via the explorer tree into another folder (but that would just copy them, I believe)...
anyways... could list the soft that remains but that strikes me as beyond the point..
So: I'm wondering what I can do to figure out what happened to them.. can I use event viewer or some other diagnostic tool to find out what the hell did this? I'm not that concerned about getting the plugs back but that would be nice... I've already tried a system restore to no avail.. havent had much luck with restore points in the past so my faith isn't too great...
Could this have been a worm? like: what is going on ? Ive been mucking around with various AVs as of late, only to uninstall them once they start to muddle my process. So, now reinstalling some of those to see if they detect anything.. So: any advice ? pretty certain that this is not a HW failure, and don't think it would have targeted just one folder...
notable is that one of the last things I installed was the physical audio bundle from the sister site...
thanks for reading...
x

 

Have you deleted something recently? Shithole uninstallers will sometimes do some pisshole thing where it mass deletes everything within some folder via a fucky setting upon deletion.

Like 5 years ago a russian site program deleted all the files inside my VST2 folder right along with the only one I requested. I of course flipped shit, panicking, had no backup plan, no external drive or money to buy one, unfortunately. My music and progress was shot at such an abrubt heartsinking dead end when that was my first true focused growth spurt.

Still to this day i think about that music I lost but on the flipside if this has happened to you without a way out then just know it made me a better producer & musician in the end.

 

oh man

... this happened to me last month... had no idea what happened , though... so i'm still a bit gun shy ... and actually... I used bcuninstaller to get rid of a coupel of things... and maybe that was it... but i tried restoring to the restore point that it created and it did nothing... oh wait... lemme try that restore point i think i did the one before.... TMI lol ...
anyways lets give it a shot... and yesh ibve lost so much so so sos os os os much of my music its really demoralizing and aawful... yes: heartbreaking...

thanks ,
C

 

Do you keep a copy of your files on an external drive, do you have the VST3 folder backed up? I have mine always backed up and handy just in case it happens again, I can pull the ole switcheroo on its ass cause I'm ready this time. Yea, see if you have another previous backup before last month.

I keep a backup of all my FL studio files from every section of my pc just in case I screw things up again.

 

One way to protect your files is to use Shadow Defender.

 

nope dint work....

 

Do you have an update of the vst3 files on your external drive? like maybe if you backed up your DAW folder onto your external HD?

 

nope... ive got a secondary drive that is pretyy much fully discrete, w no os, and that has the installers (at least)

 

Damn well that sucks, was it a lot of plugins? Is it too much to reinstall them all if that's all that's missing from your hardrive and you don't have a backup on hand?

 

Same partition drag'n'drop = Move files & folders
Different partition drag'n'drop = Copy files & folders

Did you tried to find your *.vst3 files with a MFT search tool like Search Everything from Voidtools?

If you didn't find your vst3s then try a file recovery tool immediately .. every bit which gets written now on this partition makes it more impossible to recover files!

 

Gnarly. I hate hearing about shit like this. Hope you work it out. It sounds like potentially a ransomware move but one that targets vsts? Hope there's no such thing...

 

I once had a badly made uninstaller from the sister site delete all my VST3 plugins. I think it was Vocaloid 5? Not sure since it's been a while, but your case might be something similar.

Nowadays, I back up all my shit. It might be a good practice to start zipping your VST folders at least once a month.

 

Last time I know of this issue was with the uninstaller for Yamaha Vocaloid (5.x I believe), as shinjija mentioned.
I have my "vst3" folder as a symlink which prevents the actual folder from being deleted by uninstallers.
I also do frequent backups.
It would be very good to know what caused this.
===========================

Spoiler: Checked out Physical Audio & it seems OK

EDIT: Using Revo to track the install. It won't help if the uninstaller deleted things, but it's still a record.

OK ... first thing I notice with the Physical Audio stuff is that the "Trial" installer wants to install to "C:\Program Files\Common Files\".
I thought perhpas it would add a vendor folder to the path, but in the next click the path remains only "C:\Program Files\Common Files\" WHAT?

OK I find that as I finished the install it DOES create a Vendor folder and product folder, like this:
"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Physical Audio\Derailer"

I find that it placed the VST3 into the root of my VST3 folder. (That is not a clue as to potential problem, and it is what MANY vendors do...it just is STUPID or LAZY or WRONG or INCONSIDERATE, or etc to not put them into a vendor folder.)

So now the check is to uninstall. Not using Revo to uninstall, because I want to keep the record of install. I uninstalled "Derailer" and it seemed to uninstall properly.
Now i've run through the rest and I see no problem.

I did not see in your 2nd post you said that you used an uninstaller:
"I used bcuninstaller to get rid of a coupel of things.."
I would suspect that the uninstaller caused it, but I am not familiar with "bcuninstaller", so i have no real idea, but many uninstallers are both powerful enough to do such things, and stupid enough to do such things without enough warnings.
I am assuming you mean Bulk Crap Uninstaller in this case.
Most of these I will not allow to actually clean or uninstall things and I use them more as discovery and information tools.
I HAVE used REVO uninstaller to uninstall things a few times, but always make sure I have a very recent full backup beforehand. It only takes 30 minutes to do a backup.

As much as people need to practice using a plugin or a DAW, or anything else, people need to practice backing up and restoring to make sure you know the procedure and that it works.

People MUST either learn how or NEVER be sure that they won't lose everything...

 

Last edited: Apr 1, 2023

yeah, I don't think that the physical audio release was the culprit after all.. i'm still not even sure hwo to trace back to when it happened or even what happened.. and, yeah... it was bulk crap uninstaller... and it created a restore point for the uninstallations that i had done, and when i reverted, it changed nothing... at this point, i've taken it in stride and am going to usei t as an oppotunity to pare down my unused vst list.. but also: how would you go about backing up? would you image the disk? Or is there something else that i'm unaware of that is more economical? and after howwever many years i'm just nwo starting to dip my pond into the toe of backups (and AVs for that matter), and on that note:
Can you or anyone else PLEasse recommend an inobtrusive / non-extremist AV solution? I've been through so many and they all seem to be absolutely awful... pedantic... impossible for a Tester like me who has to test at least 3 pieces of software a day (It's my livelihood: each time I test a new release my music gets better.. pretty ooon i'll be the aerosmith of computer music

 

maybe someone played an April Fool on you?

 

hey, now..

you're a rocksatar

 

Maybe download a tool called Everything from voidtools and search for your lost VST3s?

 

How do I make my vst folder a symlink too? I've no idea what this is but i want it.

 

its really useful and kinda deceptively simple... ive got my vockkalkdooid voice banks on my secondary hard drive because my primary is constantly runnig out of space,and i make it so that vocaloid thinks that the voice banks that are on the secondary are on the primary drive when I run it.. ther are lots of clever ways to use them so yeah you do it by pressing alt _ + and typin g this code in +rf3euf 900*(&)(*&()*&u
use this shit, fucker its good: https://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

 

Damn, my VST3 folder only has 17 plugins...

But I'm using Linux and VST2 generally. :P

A word of advice on Windows and uninstalling plugins: never uninstall plugins through control panel. Just delete them manually from VSTx folder and from Program Files, Common Files, ProgramData. If you have the expertise open regedit hkey/local machine/software and find it and delete it there, too. You can use CrapCleaner for that.

The problem is that some plugins install the uninstall.exe directly into VST folder and erase everything in it when you uninstall it. Quite simple and very stupid of plugin makers. They should always install plugins into separate folders, e.g. Korg, Roland, Arturia etc... and then it will erase only that folder along with other plugins in it.

Just always uninstall manually. That's the safest way. Don' be lazy.