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Participating Frequently
November 8, 2020
Question

I’ve lost a day of work from my premiere pro project.

  • November 8, 2020
  • 5 replies
  • 1666 views

I've been working within this project for weeks. I finished up a day of edits on Friday, and then I just opened up the project again today. The project is there but the whole day of work from Friday is gone. It says that the last time the project was worked on was Thursday at around 7pm which is when I finished work on that day. But where is all my work from Friday?! I save constantly and I have the computer do a backup every night. I did a LOT of editing on Friday and this is a job with a tight deadline-I really can't lose a day. Please tell me someone has a miracle solution to this?! 

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5 replies

Averdahl
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 9, 2020

Data don´t just disappear if it indeed has been saved in Premiere Pro and you seem to go the safe way with daily backups and that´s really good. So it seems that there must be someting else that causes this.

 

One common mistake that all do, including myself, is to by mistake close a Timeline without even noticing it. The result is that the next time the project is opened a whole Timeline is mysteriously "gone". The fact is thankfully that the Timeline is still there, one just have to find it in the Project panel and double click on it to open it again.

 

Maybe that´s your issue here? Here are the icons to look for:

Community Expert
November 9, 2020

Another scenario: He opened the project from the backup, worked all day, closed Premiere, and overwrite it with the one from the main directory. That's why I would right-click Premiere Pro's icon in the taskbar and see which file I opened recently and where it's located. 

Legend
November 9, 2020
Great tip. I'm working on a Mac and a pc with projects in both pr2019 and
20 with projects stored on boot drives, externals and Dropbox. I sometimes
get lost if its been a week or 2 since working on a project. This is one
of the reasons I love this forum.
Legend
November 9, 2020

can you explain what you mean by doing a backup every night?  and of course it might help if

you tell us your system specs: OS version, Premiere version, amount of RAM, Hardware specs including graphics card and source properties and sequence settings

Ann Bens
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 9, 2020

Make a habit of Save a Copy to another drive.

FAQ: When to use "Save A Copy," or "Save As," and ...

Participating Frequently
November 9, 2020

Yes I follow all the rules in that article pretty religiously. 

Peru Bob
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 8, 2020

Did you back it up?

If so, make a copy of the backup and open that.

 

If you didn't back it up, I know it won't help you now, but you may want to check out Schofield's Second Law:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/follow-schofields-three-laws-of-computing-and-avoid-disasters/

 

Participating Frequently
November 9, 2020

Yep, my computer has a backup system that backs up everything during the night, every night. 

Community Expert
November 8, 2020

Have you checked the autosave folder?
Also sometimes I find that right-clicking on Premiere's icon in the taskbar (Windows 10 here) to be useful: it shows the latest projects that I opened, and also hovering over the names shows the project's path as a tooltip

Participating Frequently
November 9, 2020

Yep checked everywhere. The whole day is missing. The last autosaves it goes back to are from the previous day.