FCP 6.0.3 loosing saved project file

Have you ever worked for a couple of hours, saving saving saving and then open up the file the next day and all the work is gone?
Even one of the project files is missing.

Of course its not doing it today while I'm saving to seperate locations (copies)..... fortunately my director was with me, so either both of us are "in the twilight zone" or something is very very strange. and yes, I did exhaustive searches on all drives.

ideas?

tnx,
Sanjay
2x2.8 GHZ quad-core Mac Pro
4 gb mem
osx 10.5.8

> Have you ever worked for a couple of hours, saving saving saving and then open up the file the
> next day and all the work is gone?

I've had an editor, whom I was assisting, complain about this. But in every single instant where I've heard this complaint, it was because of human error, not the software -- for example, people relying on "Open last project on launch", or not doing manual backups regularly, are very susceptible to a problem like this. If you let FCP open up "a" project on launch without checking what project you're looking at, that's a major danger.

Frankly, if you finish an editing session and don't do a backup, you're leaving yourself at risk to problems like these. I do a date-time-stamped manual backup once every two hours or so, on top of Autosave, and I make an extra backup of the backup to a USB flash drive, which is detached from the editing system when not performing the backup or a restore.

Have you checked your Autosave Vault?


www.derekmok.com

Did you restore an autosave and then save your changes on top of the autosave?

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Yes, I actually have had this happen to me once.... in 2007. but it was a project corruption thing. I was silly and didn't shut down the system for three days, or out of the program for two days. I normally never ever ever do this. Always save back up shut down nightly.

So day 1 everything was fine. System was normal. Left late knowing I was coming in early, I didn't shut down system, but closed FCP.

Both manual save and autosaves were happening through all of day 2 and day 3. Autosave was popping up every 7 minutes. Well my system crashed 7 hours into day 3. Went back to autosaves, and they were all corrupt. Every single one of them after midmorning on day 2. My project file itself that I had been saving, had a "modified date and time" on day 3, however, upon opening the project, it was opening up to where the midmorning autosaves went corrupt.

I have no idea what happened or why. I didn't waste time to trace it.... I just figured it was my punishment for not shutting her down for three straight days.

Typically though this is definitely a user error. Typically opening up an autosave project, and such, and just losing track of what project you are in and where things are being saved to. Do a spotlight search, for .fcp and sort by modified date. I'm guessing they are all somewhere.

> Well my system crashed 7 hours into day 3. Went back to autosaves, and they were all corrupt.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of corruption was it? Because it's certainly unusual to be able to work on a project that's already corrupt. And if a corruption happens as you work, the safest thing to do is to copy everything to a new project file, and also export an XML as a contingency, before you quit out of it.


www.derekmok.com

Yea, it was weird. Really really weird. Obviously, a day had gone by until the crash, but I couldn't really place any specific thing I had done around that time that would have caused the corruptions . Project that was corrupt wasn't very large- under 25mb from what I remember. It was all NTSC/DV material video wise. I had a bunch of audio tracks and music. All of my other open projects throughout the 2 days for example my "Bins" project containing all my scene bins, music, SFX, etc all saved perfectly fine the entire time, as did the autosaves. Just my "sequences" project bit it hard. I think I was 6.0.2 at the time, and 10.4.11?

Basically every autosave project that I attempted to open from the point of the last autosave which was 2 minutes before my crash all the way back it would give me the error that said something like "this is not a file FCP can open". The main project file that I had been saving had the modified time within 20 minutes of the crash, only when opened the sequence in the actual project was a flashback in time. I copied my sequences out, into a new project, and recreated the day and a half and moved on. Never to experience another issue.

I didn't do any moving of project files etc. at the root level. Didn't change any scratch disk settings or autosave locations. I'm sure I must have imported MX/SFX from my bins project into the sequence in my "sequences" project, but in terms of a specific no idea really.

It was like I was working in an invisible project for a day and a half.

Thanks, All.
Yes, I looked at autosave, and searched everywhere for updated or rather, "saved" files. I save compulsively and even did backup saves to seperate drive. If my Director hadn't been sitting next to me and validating this whole "twilight zone" experience, I would have written it off to "old-timers!"

I've been too busy catching up on lost work, so haven't done any more research into the problem. I will also say, however, that I was having some strange cpu behavior prior to the project file problems, ie. running slow, even crashing the timeline (freeze-up). I trashed prefs a couple of times, permissions, cleaned up the garbage on the desktop, checked cpu and ram performance. Its been running fine since. AND now I do the "flash stick" back up too.
Thanks for that "process improvement".
Sanjay