I just lost 6 hours of work! My autosave is set for every 12 minutes. At 1:30pm, I went to take a break, so I saved my work and left the room. When I got back 30 minutes later, Cubase was locked up on my computer, so I shut it down and restarted. When it was back up, I loaded the project, only to find that the last real version was 6 hours old, and the last auto save was 5 minutes older than THAT! What the hell happened? How? Why? This has never happened to me in 32 years of using Cubase! I’m devastated!
Hi,
this could have something have to do with your naming-scheme.
What kind of save commands did you do before your break? Not just the very last one but all save commands?
I would sort your Auto Save folder within your project by date and see what’s popping up? Please make sure that this is the correct Auto Save / Project Folder for your latest session, too.
Here’s a little documentation about Auto Save behaviour that goes beyond the brief documentation you’ll find in the manual.
I keep my fingers crossed that this was just a matter of naming-schemes!
There was nothing different or unusual about the naming; I changed nothing when I saved it. When I saved the file, I just hit “Save” in the file menu like I always do.
I’ve been through the folders. There is no file in any folder associated with this project from between early this morning and about 3:30 this afternoon, when I set up the project again and saved it, and nothing from before the save point at around 8:00 this morning- and nothing from the past 3 days!
It’s mostly a 30-MIDI file project with 2 audio tracks of vocals, and I just discovered that all my project audio files are gone as well- ALL THE VOCALS ARE MISSING!! I have the originals of course, but the tracks of tweaked vocals have vanished! And that’s WEEKS of work!
This is very, very strange.
This can only mean that you did not actually save the project at 1:30. Maybe Cubase was already in a freeze-crash state, and you didn’t realize it, or it might have been user error. If the file had been saved it would have been there, and that, itself, has nothing to do with the auto-save function.
Auto-save does not happen when the transport is running, nor if there are no changes to the cpr to save, so had you saved the file at 1:30 there would have been no auto-saves after that.
It is unknown what transpired in your case with the info provided, and it sucks to have lost work, for sure.
See my post here also
I had saved the project manually numerous times throughout the day, but the last save time was from about 8:00 am. And I can’t believe that Autosave did not function once between Saturday afternoon and today. I’ve worked on this project every day for weeks, and it almost always stays open. Something very definitely went wrong, especially when my audio files have completely evaporated. I’m currently searching my computer for any clues. I’ll update if I solve any of this.
In that case you must be looking in the wrong directory, or your computer has had a storage disk catastrophe. Audio files are not touched by cpr saving, cpr deleting, auto-save or anything else. Even when the user records files and then closes without saving there’s a dialog asking whether they wish to delete the audio files.
see also:
My bet is that you find all of it.
I run into a bug quite consistently where the auto-save breaks. It’s some kind of internal crash that doesn’t throw an error message.
Symptoms I look out for are my automation system breaking, a memory leak, or most often, the undo system breaking. If I notice any of those things happening, I save as a new version, quit and restart Cubase.
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No, the first thing I did when I realized they were missing was go to the Audio folder. There is nothing there dated after last Saturday night.
What OS are you on?
Win10
The Audio pool confirms that the audio files were registered, but apparently were never written to disk- no file path, no date or time.
This answers my previous question. I was about to suggest to use Windows´ search function and adjust the search filter to the time of your last session.
You could do it anyways, won’t take long. This way you’ll have a final confirmation that nothing was written to your disk under a different name. Best case it’s just your project that has mysteriously lost all paths. I guess it’s worth a try.
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This is a learning experience. Most of us have had similar things happen. I once deleted the wrong partition and lost 200 gigabytes of files. I had a backup. It happens.
When I work on a project I backup after every session. Worst case loss is maybe
Well, that was as far as I got when this forum site forced me to reload this draft due to “an error”. Maybe 150 words lost. How about that.
Yeah, things can go wrong anytime.
I once had my PC reset during a thunderstorm.
Also look at the Windows Trashcan. If files got deleted maybe they are there.
Did nobody else have access to your computer while you were gone?
So after a day of cooler investigation, the mystery has been (mostly) solved. The “disappearance” of my many smaller audio files was a completely different situation from the vanishing of the the larger project backup files and vocal tracks. I just happened to notice the one while investigating the other, and it seemed like the same or related problem. It was not. That problem, if you’re interested, was a filing oversight that filed all the hundreds of audio files from hundreds of small demo projects into a single Audio folder in the TEMPLATE folder for those specific projects. I’ll iron THAT out later.
At some point in the past few days, Cubase had a seizure, and decided to abandon its commitment to Autosave. Then yesterday, Cubase further had an aneurism, which caused it to freeze, and it then lost it’s ability to track the audio files in the project. From the audio pool, I could see that it knew OF the files, but had no knowledge of the pathway to get TO them. However, as it turned out, the original COPY (not the actual “original”) that I had imported into the project was safe and sound in the Audio folder INSIDE of the Auto Save folder. What WAS missing was the Edit folder for the project, which apparently disappeared during the aneurism. So once I reconnected Cubase to the audio files, it loaded them, but without my edits. However, from the audio pool, I was also able to ascertain the individual edit files, which I recreated with the information from the pool list, and installed in my NEW Edits folder. THEN Cubase was able to effect the edits on the audio, and everything is now back to normal. I do not know what happened to Cubase to cause it to stop autosaving, nor do I know why it lost track of the audio files and the Edits folder.
I hope this information is useful to someone in the future who runs into similar situations.
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