Ouch. Inserting a blank page cost me a day’s work. (Staff spacing)

Dorico
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Oh the mystery and misery of learning new software! I just finished an orchestra score and was ready to print, but innocently inserted a blank page which trashed my carefully adjusted staff spacings. Unfortunately I didn’t realize what happened until I printed a test page and by that time my backups were overwritten. Lesson learned.

I don’t know how to prevent this in the future. The manual (I just learned) actually warns not to do this, which suggests to me that this area of the program could be improved?

The work I lost consisted of 100’s of manual staff spacing adjustments and various graphical edits. It’s a dense score w/many pages over >100% vertical frame fullness. Dorico’s built-in algos don’t seem up to such a task, which is understandable. BUT, some form of “lock layout” function is really needed to protect newbies like me.

There is much to appreciate about Dorico, but the learning curve is indeed steep.
Sorry if this sounds like a rant. Rough day. Kind suggestions are welcome.

This post from last year addresses the same issue but the solutions offered seem cumbersome at best:

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I don’t have a lot of experience with this idea, but you might check your backup folder. On my computer it’s in …\Dorico Projects\Backup Projects\

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I’m sorry to hear about this situation, @Rhenn, that must be really frustrating. It is indeed the case that staff spacing overrides are locked to pages, and if the page number for those overrides (staves) changes, they are likely to get reset (there are some cases where they are preserved, but these are fairly limited).

If quite a lot of pages are being calculated as over 100% full vertically, it could well be that adjusting some settings in the project itself could get you closer to your ideal end result, before needing to use staff spacing overrides at all.

You’re very welcome to send me your project privately, and I can take a look and make some recommendations, if it looks like there are some useful ones to be made.

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Best Practices with any kind of software…

Make ‘save as’ backups on a fairly regular basis and use file names that indicate to yourself where you were in the project at the time.

Much software has a pretty elaborate self-backup system these days (time stamped saves every so often that are capable of preserving/undoing/redoing every move a user makes), but until one understands ‘exactly’ how it works (interfaces and tools for access, various settings and options, pros, cons, power-features, or lack there of) for a given App, where it puts things, how it names it, etc…it never hurts to do manually forced back-ups that place and name files where you can easily find them and copy/move them about (say, to your backup drive, the cloud, media for sharing, etc).

Invent your own manual backup system for the short term, and over the long term take steps to learn ‘exactly’ how auto-backup, undo, redo, etc. might work for a given app. In my experience, the more advanced and power-user loaded an apps auto-backup system is, the ‘more confusing’ it can be in the short term to master using it, and recalling various stages of your work.

Example: Every hour or so use Save As and make a fresh copy of the score in a folder that you know you can find easily. You might even put hints in the file name that make it easier for you personally to ‘go back in time’ to various stages/versions of your project.

Any time you take a break or ‘walk away’ from your project, make it a habit to fork off a new copy with a new name. Because? Things can happen while you’re away from the computer…

Anytime you try a new feature, or attempt to do things that might effect the entire layout, go ahead and use save-ass to fork off a fresh project. This adds confidence that you can easily ‘roll back’ to a safe starting point if you have an ‘oops’ moment.

Forcing your own personal backup system might also lead to more flexibility in ‘trying new ideas’ and keeping multiple versions of a project to ‘compare and contrast’ as you go. You might decide at some point to copy/paste portions from different versions into a ‘best of’ project much later. Maybe you’ve decided to use more or fewer flows to more easily produce over all look and feel desired from your score and parts. Maybe you want independent projects for larger and smaller print/paper-size versions. Maybe you want to spin off project versions that use different styles/fonts/spacing/etc. And when it comes to experimenting with the endless ‘score interpretation and playback’ options, forking off new copies of the Score will most certainly be a useful tactic to ‘experiment, trace issues, and document’ different ideas and project states.

Make it part of your workflow, and use the time to rest your brain and ears. Come up with your own system that helps ensure that you’ll avoid losing more than an hour of work.

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Sorry to hear that. It’s gruelling when things fall down.

Dorico’s backups are only the last couple of saves, but surely you have a system-wide backup that includes older versions from days, weeks, months…?

My cat has an uncanny ability to press the delete key when she walks on the keyboard. She’s also renamed an external drive; and opened a new text document and typed “Hi”.

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Yes! Cats, kids, practical jokers, power surges, OSes that decide to update/reboot on their own. Anti-Virus/malware suites deciding for some reason that they don’t like the apps you’ve left running.

Plus the things we do on our own but will never admit unless drunk and having a ‘po mouthing, dumbest things I’ve done to myself using a computer’ contest with peers.

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I’ve complained about this problem on more than one occasion. While it’s a very nice coding model to have the formatting attached to a page, it’s utterly impractical from a users perspective. The idea that I cannot tidy up my music unless I’m absolutely sure nothing will ever change ever until the end of time, is ludicrous.

–Neil

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Thanks all for your suggestions. @Lillie_Harris I just sent you the project. @Brian_Roland thanks - yes, I use multiple back-up strategies including sequential file names, dropbox, etc. But somehow, I still managed to outsmart myself and lose one day’s work. (I limited my auto-backups to 3 copies and that was a mistake.) That + Murphy’s Law; live and learn.

As I said in my OP, I do think some sort of “freeze layout” function is needed given the way Dorico handles page overrides. So Devs, please consider this a Feature Request.

In the meantime, multiple backups are the best answer.

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This is configurable. I set mine to 20. In addition, whenever I anticipate making major revisions (e.g. different key, adding a major section, etc), I rename my working Dorico file as … V2, … V3 etc. So it isn’t unusual for me to have 50 backups of a project. just under the Dorico system, plus several other layers of backup in my own infrastructure.

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I tend to rely on 1 Dorico backup, and the hourly/weekly/monthly backups of macOS’s Time Machine (which has saved my bacon countless times).

If I create too many “Version” copies, then it’s easy to forget which one has what, and God help you if you need to merge work from two files.

(Apropos of nothing, I’m collaborating on a project, and someone has sent me a “final final final” document, which doesn’t have the changes I made to the “final final” document…)

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Lillie,

I considered inserting a blank flow to use as title page, etc. at the beginning of a large multi-movement work. The only problem then is flow numbering. I would need a “flow number offset” that started with zero to keep the movement/flow numbers correct. Otherwise just manually frame in the movement headings?

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Wouldn’t it be simpler to design a “title page” page template, and use that on the first page in the layout?

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I have added a “Title Page” flow at the end of the file (with front piece pages numbered in lower case Roman numerals) and then moved it to the front in the PDF version.

I just have to make sure the front material is an even number of pages to make sure the music page numbers are in the proper position.

3 Likes
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A few thing: First, sorry that work was lost - that’s a pain.

–Remember that Undo can be a great friend.

–If you have a score that has lots of manual edits, it can be a good idea to save the score with another name (V2, for example), and use that for your layout experiments.

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Not if it is going to shift all the formatting in the rest of the flow? Isn’t that the problem?

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The problem of staff spacing overrides getting a lost is a matter of page number. The reason for the page number changing (e.g. because you added another flow, or inserted a blank page, or inserted a frame break, etc) doesn’t matter.

If you know you’re going to want a title page on page 1, and an instrumentation, composer’s note etc on page 2 from the outset, but you don’t necessarily know what’s going to be on them, my recommendation is this: add two custom page templates, call one “p1” or “Title”, the other “p2” or something similar, and assign them to pages 1 and 2 in your score respectively.

When you later decide what you want on those pages, you can edit the page templates, and your edits will magically appear on pages 1 and 2 in the score.

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Of course this works if I have my wits about me at the outset of the project :wink:
Derrek’s solution saves me if I have to do it after a lot of formatting has already been accomplished.

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Sorry to hear the OP lost a day’s work.

There’s an option in Cubase called ‘save new version’ which does exactly that, incrementing the version number automatically.

I think this would be a very quick win for Dorico.

It’s so easy to save a new version in Cubase that I do it very often.

Another strategy is to run real-time back up software with full versioning. That way every time you save, the software creates a new version in the backup.

On Mac, the inbuilt Time Machine software does that - and it’s saved me a couple of times from significant losses - including accidentally overwriting the master version of a Cubase project, and accidentally deleting some critical files (and emptying the bin).

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It already exists; you just need to assign a shortcut for it and use it.

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1 Like
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Many thanks - I’ll do that!