Saved Project is Not Most Recent Version?

[AustinRLangley]

(This is a repost as my previous thread was submitting using the wrong account. Thanks!)

Hi all, on Friday evening I finished up work around 7:30p, everything was saved just fine and closed out of AE (17.1.4). Today I opened up the .aep, which is on an external drive, and the project displayed was a much earlier version with a ton of work missing. I checked the auto saves and the most recent copies were from earlier in the day on Friday.

My first thought was that maybe somehow the project got resaved elsewhere during the day on Friday? But I've checked everywhere I can think of, and nothing. I did have to hard restart my MBP (2016, Mojave 10.14.6) at one point because the external drives I had plugged in were hung up and not unmounting, but I don't believe AE was even open when I did this. I have frequent auto-saves set up and manually save my work often. I've also checked Open Recent -> and have not found any other possible versions of the project. Does anyone have any ideas what may have happened here - is it possible the most recent version still exists? Thank you for your help!

[Ali Jaber]

On windows, I would right-click on Ae icon in the taskbar, a list of recent projects is displayed, where I can hover over anyone and a tooltip will show me the path of that project. That saved me many times when I was saving my projects unintentionally at wrong locations, specially when those are on external hard drives that are not attached anymore to my desktop. Anyway, I don't know if that feature is available on Macs, as it's an operating system feature.

[AustinRLangley]

Hi Ali, thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I don't know of any Mac system features like what you descibe. However, I have used the Open Recent menu to look at all of the recent projects AE has had opened, as well as the splash/startup AE screen with recent projects, and they all point to the same project file on the same external drive. 😕 Extremely weird situation.

[Ali Jaber]

If you launch Ae while your external drive is unplugged Ae will remove all the projects pointing to that hard drive from your recent files, and if you plug your external again Ae won't restore those to recent opened files.

But right-clicking on the Ae icon in the taskbar won't be affected by unavailable hard drives which is sometimes very helpful if you want to know the exact path of an opened project from an external hard drive that was unplugged. Anyway, it looks like this operating system feature isn't available on Macs as you said.