I am a little bit panicked at the moment, so bear with me.
I updated to 2.1 yesterday, probably like most people. Today was the first time I opened Dorico since the update, I wanted to go back to a few Big Band Scores and check out the new swing feature.
Imagine my surprise to find EVERY SCORE I HAD EVER WORKED ON SINCE DAY ONE GONE…MISSING…NOT THERE!! TONS of man hours wasted. I searched my drives, trash, etc. There is only one Dorico Projects folder and it only contains the very last project I was working on before the update, every other score is gone.
Where oh where did my Dorico Projects go? Not in the Dorico Projects folder, that’s for sure.
I am so disappointed by this, all those scores and all that time, months and months wasted. I am almost in tears here!
How frightening. But I suspect it’ll be possible to find and fix.
Mac or PC?
Do you have backups, clones, Time Machine etc on which to locate them?
If you do and they’re not visible there, then there’s something else going on.
Did you try running Dorico for the first time after the update by opening it; or by launching it having double-clicked on one of its files?
Before the update in which directory were your files stored?
What shows in your Steinberg Hub?
I’d be very surprised if (the act of updating) Dorico could have sought out your scores and deleting them; so perhaps if you add a little more information, please, we can help you.
Thanks for your response. After my initial panic I remembered my Time Machine backup and I was able to restore all of my files from before I updated.
Just to answer a few of your questions, I’m on a iMac, I opened Dorico by clicking on the App icon, not a score. My files were stored in the original Dorico Projects folder originally created in version 1. The Hub showed only the last project I was working on before updating, no other scores.
I too would be very surprised if updating alone caused the problem but they WERE gone and I haven’t really done anything else on the computer since updating yesterday.
I’m just happy for Time Machine and the ability to restore them back where they belong.
As would I. Otherwise, there would have been many other posts about it.
However, you’ve learnt the value of having a backup. Extraordinarily, I still see posts on Mac forums of people who didn’t have a backup when something went wrong. Files can get deleted, drives can corrupt data or fail completely. Computers can get stolen or catch fire.
Since Sibelius introduced the Hub (from where one had to access recent files), I had a bad feeling about it and tried to avoid it whenever possible. I always open my files via the finder.
Now in Dorico I still do the same. Somehow the hub feels, as if someone else wants to take over ones job by fiddling in between. I am a fan of the finder and also like to look for my projects and recent files there.
I changed Dorico’s preferences for the hub from showing the file name to also displaying the path, still I feel uncomfortable each time I open my file from there…
Please be assured that the Dorico 2 installer and the Dorico 2.1 updater categorically do not interfere with the Dorico Projects folder in your user folder. I can’t offer any explanation for what happened on Kevin’s computer, except to say that I’m certain it wasn’t caused by installing Dorico 2.1.
On the Mac the Default project folder is (by default) ~/Documents/Dorico Projects
If one changes the language Dorico runs in to another than English, the folder created for the projects might be named differently (in German f.e. ~/Dokumente/Dorico-Projekte
I do not know, how clever Dorico (in combination with the system software) can automatically point to the right project folder, after language has been changed.
This might lead to confusion.
My project folder was still called „Dorico-Projekte“ even after I had switched back to let Dorico use it’s default language (English).
The actual behaviour under these circumstances (user jumping between languages) is not always foreseeable.
The Dorico team are pros at what they do, I have no idea either why the Dorico Projects folder went missing, actually it was still there just missing all of my scores. My first panicked thought was to blame the installer since that was the last thing I did before the problem surfaced.
Even then I knew that these people are pros and really wouldn’t make a mistake like that.
The lesson to learn is to always have backups of important files.
On a brighter note, the new swing function in Dorico is simply fantastic. Well done!! (still waiting for jazz articulations however )
I can’t stress enough the importance of having at least 2 backup disks, especially if your livelihood depends on what’s on your computer. Better is 3 with one periodically rotated off-site.
These are cheap and reliable drives: Amazon.com. They don’t need to be fast and the slower ones run cooler.
The cloud, friends. With the kinds of file sizes we’re talking about, a free cloud storage account will fit the bill. Honestly, that’s the best solution. And it syncs for easy sharing.
Of course no solution is perfect. Life is uncertain. But cloud storage is the way to go. IMHO.
I’m with Dan on this one. Just make sure that you know which features your cloud provider has, and which features it lacks.
For example, Dropbox free accounts now appear to have versioning and restoration of deleted files, but only going back a maximum of 30 days. For most uses that’s long enough, most of the time.
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