by macrae11 » Thu Oct 20, 2011 2:34 pm
You could check the settings for the jump drive, but typically they're set to transfer only. You can find this information in the workspace browser key command Option+;. There you'll see every hard drive attached to your system with 2 labels beside them, one labelled A for audio and V for video. Three's three potential states, T for Transfer, which means Pro Tools can't do anything with the drive except for copy files to a new location, P for Playback, which can read files, but can't write, and R for Record which is full access. If your jump drive is labeled R, then that could have been the problem, although I highly doubt that.
Attached external hard drives are no problem, as long as they aren't removed with online media on them.
Other than all that, there's a few ways to screw up files on a hard drive, but most are somewhat difficult to do. Some in Pro Tools directly, some in the finder, but you really have to not be paying attention, and/or be a pretty big idiot yourself. For example if you happen to hit Command+Shift+B, instead of Command+Option+B when you want to do a bounce, you can remove files from your session. In order to permanently delete them though, you would have to ok two dialogue boxes, so unlikely. Other than that bugs, computer malfeasance and the like are always possible suspects, which unfortunately I can't help you with.