Participant

Question

Project Files Disappeared from Hard Drive

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
July 26, 2018
4 replies
3026 views

I am running Premiere 12.1.1. I opened a premiere project, and about 30 seconds into working on the project the program crashed. When the program crashed, it also crashed my computer. After restarting, I navigated to the folder that contained the project files, only to see the entire folder empty. This folder had the premiere project, the Auto-save files, as well as an After Effects project with its auto-save files, but all of these files had disappeared. So the crash not only affected the premiere project, but all the files and projects that were in the same folder.

I proceeded as some others have suggested, and used a couple different file explorers (including UltraSearch) to try and search through my computer and hard drives to see if the project files had just been moved to another location. However, they are nowhere to be found. I have no idea how or why these files have disappeared, and I also have no idea how to recover them.

I work for a school district, and we use Adobe products for all of our video and graphics work, and this is very disappointing that this seems to be an on-going issue for which Adobe has not found a fix. It also makes me nervous to continue using the software, because if this happens again I have no idea about how to resolve the issues. I also have no idea why this happened, so I do not know how to prevent this from happening in the future.

This inexplicable disappearance is affecting my job, and my time, as I will now have to re-create the project from scratch, as well as re-create the after effects project that has disappeared too.

This topic has been closed for replies.

L

lex_8317

Participant

It’s unusual for files to just vanish, and it could be due to a serious system or software problem. To try and recover the files, you could use data recovery software to scan your drive for lost files. Also, check if any temporary files or backups are available in other locations. Moving forward, consider setting up regular backups and possibly using different versions of the software to avoid similar issues. Read more about possible solutions and let us know how it goes.

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BenDavis

Participant

Where you able to restore the files?

grahamc16290953

Participant

I have just found that all my projects since at least 2015 have vanished. I had them backed up on external drive. I can't find them anywhere. I have found only one. It opens but won't link with the sequence.

Please help.

Stan Jones

Community Expert

Safeharbor responded to the post you made in another long thread:

> Can I ask where you Save your projects? It is some default "Users/Adobe/Premiere" and so on folder?

I can't image how all such files would be deleted, short of a hard drive corruption, but you can see the folder is empty. So it does not appear to be corrupt.

How are you searching for the files? What text are you looking for? I've looked for things and not found them, only to realize later that my search was incorrect.

I hope the files are there somewhere, but a reminder to others who see this thread, and to you for your future work:

Autosaves can be useful, but bread and butter is doing regular "save a copy" backups to a separate hard drive.

The cloud sync you can set in PR saves only the most recent save to the cloud, which has a synced version in windows explorer and can also be accessed from the creative cloud desktop. If you had this turned on, there will be a copy of the project files there.

J

joycew25501961Author

Participant

The projects are saved on a mirrored external hard drive when they are finished, but in-progress projects are on the C: Drive desktop. The project in question was on the external drive when it disappeared. (I replied to the Safeharbor comment too, thank you for pointing that out).

I also think it is hard to believe that they have been deleted or corrupted, since the folder is empty, not with corrupted files, and there is also nothing else on the dive that was affected.

The project that disappeared was called "Athletics Promo". In File Exploerer, UltraSearch, and TreeSize, I have searched for "athletics", "athletics promo" and also just .prproj flies, which I have looked through and could not find it among those either. If It could find all the other .prproj flies, but not the missing ones, then I am not sure where they could be!

This is the first time this has happened for us, we usually have a tight system, but since we have never seen this problem before, we would not have known how to prepare for this anomaly of a problem. We are going to start doing extra backups onto our cloud system as well.

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