Hi all. I often store my work files on my network drive, and today had an unplanned disconnection of that drive, that I did not notice at first. When starting Dorico, the first screen (Steinberg hub) with recent files came up blank - instead of keeping the names of inaccessible files with something like a warning sign. I closed the hub.
After I reconnected my network drive, however, and restarting Dorico, the Steinberg hub was still empty. All the history of recent files was gone.
- Is it the intended behavior ?
- Is there a way to get back the recent file history ?
Thanks for any help!
What happens if you go to Preferences > Files in Dorico?
Can you see the relevant directory on your network drive there?
If you can, and if you select it, do you see your projects there?
No, once Dorico fails to find a file where it was, it is removed from the Recent list. (Same with Sibelius.)
Is there a possibility that this be changed in the near future for files that are stored on a NAS (something getting more common by the day) or on a removable drive?
As much as I can understand the removal of files on a fixed hard drive, storing files online (locally -NAS- or remotely -cloud-) causes the files to sometimes become unreachable (NAS / router issue, loss of internet connexion). Completely removing them from the Recent list is really annoying, and if the competition decides to jump off a bridge, let’s not follow them on that path…
Dorico prunes the recent projects list of files that can no longer be found at start-up, and it does so in a permanent way. I can appreciate that this isn’t always helpful in the case of projects located in a network location. Unfortunately it’s not always trivial to determine when a file path is not on a local device given that the OS does its best to normalise all paths into a consistent file URL, but it’s certainly something we can look at in future when we have time.
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I didn’t realize it was done at startup. In Sibelius (as I know you know, but for others reading) a file pointer is removed when you try to open it and it is not found. I can actually make use of this to manually remove an unwanted recent file from the list, by simply moving it temporarily.
Daniel, I don’t suppose it would be of interest to change this, but the old Sib approach could help a little with losing recent file pointers. As it is, obviously one has to be careful to verify one’s NAS before launching.
I think that doing the file access check when the user is trying to open it, then if not found asking the user if they want to keep that file in the Recent list or not, would indeed be the most sensible way to handle that problem… or maybe the way CaptureOne does it with images - check at startup and put an exclamation mark on the file thumbnail, with the possibility for the user to right-click and change the location of the file. Anything except bulk-removing all links at once without asking the user…
Hi Mark, another thought… Before checking if a file is still there, why not check that the mounted drive is still accessible (whether through a drive letter on Windows, or a folder in the Volumes on Mac) ? If the drive is not mounted, then the file is placed in a “dormant” list; if the drive is mounted, then indeed the file was (re)moved and it can be taken off the Recent list pending user approval, or the user can select its new location.