Lost Project

[DerekLegg]

I had almost completed a small project and closed down ( switched to empty project before doing so ) for a break. When I reopened, the project had completely gone yet the hard drive is showing the percentage of used capacity of my lost project. Any ideas as to what might have happened would be appreciated, I haven't come across this before.

[TomHajewski]

Sorry, Derek, no idea of what happened or how to fix it.

The same thing happened to me with a major project about a year and a half ago. I was using a version of Smart Edit 6 and lost my entire storyboard and many (but not all) scenes in my scene bin. I checked with tech support in Boulder and posted on this BB, but was never able to recover the lost scenes or storyboard.

[TimKennelly]

Yeah, I had that happen once years ago.

I think I was on SE2 with my Avio and got that double whammy of losing everything, but the hard drive still counted the space so I did not have enough room to add much more and after trying everything finally gave up, did a full, destructive install and started from scratch.

Very, very irritating and I purchased a Solitaire with the internal mirror backup shortly thereafter.

[DerekLegg]

Thanks Tom and Tim for your response I now know what I have to do.
Derek

[LouBruno]

Before closing down on a project, I always back the project up to the LACIE external HD. I simply overide the last entry of the same project.

[HansJoachimKoenig]

Lou,
good idea, saves a lot of time if project gets somewhat lost.

[pdjohnson]

The same thing happened to me just today. I had a project that was a duplicate, getting ready to send it to Arabesk. I sometimes send each final scene to another project to get rid of all the extra "mess"and make my rendering less complicated. If something needs corrected, I still have my original edits and can easily make any changes. but.... today, my duplicate had just disappeared? Go figure. I was lucky I still had the orginal under another project.

[JohnKleban]

Okay, no jinx here please , but I have never shut down on an empty project and haven't had any issues. On occasion, after heavy use (although my unit is on several hours a day) I might hit the record button, then jump back out; I think I recall that forcing the unit into doing a hard-save. Also, on rare occasion, if my hard-drive is over the 90% mark and I finished a labor intensive mix, edit, etc., then I do sometimes dump that out to tape when I am done for the day.

A final point (and not recommended in general by MS I believe - but it has worked for me), if your unit locks up or you sense a red box coming up as the result of your cursor disappearing, etc., a quick unplugging of the unit may halt any "ill effects" that were in the process of occurring. Likewise, if you make a global change or goof up something, think of this unplugging as a type of "undo" feature; now, I don't recommend people do this heavily or with every little hick-up, but, just something to keep in the back of your mind. Once a year or so, I have done that and it's worked fine without causing me to get an on-screen message about the project being restored from an earlier back-up.