File not really saved, everything lost, what the.....

[daveyboy]

This will pobably sound confusing and I actually don't expect to resolve this, just prevent it from happening again.

I'm working with a client who uses dp 4.12 (I'm in 5.01). We work together a lot and are seldom using the exact same version of DP at the same time. This particular song has been being worked on for a few months off and on without incident....until now (insert dramatic music here).

I opened up the file last week and immediately did a "save as" with a new name indicating that day's work. We're just mixing now. We worked for 3 hours, I made a new mix in the mixer window and labled it, etc, and printed the mix back into dp, labeled correctly, etc. Done. All this was done on his firewire drive. He takes it home as always.

I forgot to do a save as back to dp 4.1. He actually has version 5 so now installs it and gets it to open. When he does open it he can't find the mix we did in the tracks window. He does find it in the audio folder though but can't get it to open. Weird. After a few phone calls back and forth he decides to come over last night to see if I can open the file and check it out. I open it (as he did) but have the same problem. Can't even open the mix in peak. Seems corrupt. On top of that, my last mix isn't even there within the song file so that I can do a quick remix and send him on his way. I look in the undo history window and see that on our last day workingon this song there's only a history for the first 50 minutes of our 3 hour session.

Bottom line: DP reverted back 2 hours and didn't save anything past that time. Don't know why. Another one of those "that's never happend before" things. Something was obviously corrupted and it decided not to save any changes for those 2 hours. Maybe something weird with the fact that I opened an older version, even though I've done it many times before. The only thing I can think of to do is to make sure this never happens again. FYI, I never purged the undo history or even opened it up, didn't compact the project at the end. The few new audio files that I made were in the audio folder but not in the tracks window. Thanks for any insight!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

This will pobably sound confusing and I actually don't expect to resolve this, just prevent it from happening again.

Cannot be certain, but on my system, every so often (maybe 5 times a day more or less) my FireWire connection goes dead and my audio (on an M-Audio FW410) goes south for about 10 seconds. I attribute it to either the MAUDIO driver being flaky, the Mac OS searching for FW devices or a combination of both.

Point being, I think FW is sometimes unreliable and I would not trust it for my only file backup. I am now in the habit of backing up my important files to two internal drives that I know i can move to my G4 (I'm on a G5) in case one goes bad or the machine goes down. I could not afford to loose months of orchestration because of a bad file or save. Nor could anyone else serious about making music or recording, especially as a living. that is the same as a pianist having their fingers broken and in casts for a few months. Maybe worse! At least the pianists reputation (hopefully good) will remain. But get a reputation for being unreliable in this biz and ... well, then you go into marketing

So while i cannot offer any help in recoving, I will suggest you save to a reliable internal drive as your backup. It hasn't saveed me from my own stupidity but it has saved me from file corruption from time to time.

FWIW, I also save my files incrementally every day and get in the habit of hitting the save button after every 5 minutes or so. Yeah, I have a bloated drive until the project is over, but in the end, I don;t usually loose much time fretting over a minor glitch here and there.

[daveyboy]

Thanks midilife. Yeah, I'm a saving nut. After every change I save. I don't think this was a backup issue but a weird corruption issue. I also use Retrospect to backup after every session. Anywho. when I see him again, I'll quit the song after a few minutes and make sure it's saving correctly and drag it over to my drive as a temp backup for him.

[WSVP]

Bottom line: DP reverted back 2 hours and didn't save anything past that time. Don't know why. Another one of those "that's never happend before" things. Something was obviously corrupted and it decided not to save any changes for those 2 hours. Maybe something weird with the fact that I opened an older version, even though I've done it many times before. The only thing I can think of to do is to make sure this never happens again. FYI, I never purged the undo history or even opened it up, didn't compact the project at the end. The few new audio files that I made were in the audio folder but not in the tracks window. Thanks for any insight!

While I have never had this experience first hand, I have heard of it happening. This may not a MOTU issue, it may be an Apple issue. If for some reason the hard drive your active file is on "unmounts" or becomes invisible to the OS, sometimes the saved file seems to to be stored in ram or perhaps cached somewhere the "save" function seems to work with no warning. This is a VERY RARE problem but could occur more frequently if you use an external hard drive as your work drive.

However... In your situation I assume that you are playing back audio files from the drive in question which would not be possible if the drive unmounted, leading me to believe that you may have accidentally over-wrote the file. We are all human and make mistakes. Whenever you have multiple versions of the same file on a system there is always a danger.

[Frodo]

FYI, I never purged the undo history or even opened it up, didn't compact the project at the end. The few new audio files that I made were in the audio folder but not in the tracks window. Thanks for any insight!

This is the first thing that popped into my mind. Lots of save glitches have been averted by flushing at least some of the Undo History.

Sorry to hear that the Undo History/Save/Save As/Save As Version # issue has carried over-- thought this had been overcome.

[Jim]

I had a similar thing happen to me last week. I started a new project in 5.01 on 10.4.7. I worked on it for an hour and a half, saving as I went. I tried doing a BTD, which wasn't working correctly. So, I closed the application and relaunched, and to my surprise, the project was in the same state it was in after I did my very first save. IOW, I lost over an hour's worth of work.

Could've been much worse. I rebuilt the project from scratch in 4.61, and that got me through. I would've posted it here, but it was just too bizarre.

.

[PJ]

This has also happened to me with 5.01. I noticed it quite soon, because apple + S command didn't 'lit' File menu anymore. Lucky me, I lost only about 15 minutes of work.

[dosuna11]

I'm in 4.61 and have to agree it is a firewire issue as the drive I was saving to crashed with in a month of the saving issue rearing it's head. BACKUP is what saved me.

[martian]

hard to backup something that has not been saved yet!!

this happened to me to - ost like 3 or 4 hours work......

fortunately just once....

but how do you know?

[Mr_Clifford]

This is wierd. Literally a couple of minutes after reading this thread, I loaded up my latest project in DP and had the exact same experience. Everything I had done earlier today was gone. Never existed. No trace. Luckily I hadn't actually done much but i know that I had created a new sequence and put down a couple of short ideas, all of which were gone. I know I definitely saved, and it was on my internal drive. I've never experienced anything like this before. I'm certainly no stranger to losing work through crashes & 'unexpected' quits. But when you think you've saved! That's just plain dangerous.

I guess for now it's a good idea to go into finder and check the 'last modified' time on the file before quitting. I hope they get to the bottom of this one real quick.

I'm in 5.1 too, which until this was looking very promising. - although the file was started in 5.01, which may have some bearing on it.

[daveyboy]

I'm glad it's not just me, even though there doesn't seem to be a concrete ryhme or reason for it. I'll be real careful the next time I work on this project and will check it throughout the session to make sure stuff is actually saving like it should.

[dosuna11]

What I mean't about backup was this. When I encountered the missing saved files I hit the external hard drive with Disk Warrior. The files then appeared in the tree and I backed them up to another drive which is why the backup save mE.

[Jim]

I'm in 4.61 and have to agree it is a firewire issue as the drive I was saving to crashed with in a month of the saving issue rearing it's head. BACKUP is what saved me.

FWIW, mine was NOT FW related... I was working exclusively on an internal SATA.

[PJ]

I'm in 4.61 and have to agree it is a firewire issue as the drive I was saving to crashed with in a month of the saving issue rearing it's head. BACKUP is what saved me.

FWIW, mine was NOT FW related... I was working exclusively on an internal SATA.

Same here (internal SATA 2nd drive).

[dosuna11]

Is there a common OS? Anybody at OS 4.5 having this problem? I have an iMac G5 2.1 Mhz.