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JazzMac251
Inspiring
July 13, 2018
Question

Entire Project Gone

  • July 13, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 1120 views

I am working on a personal project with many complex pieces. At the beginning of the process 3 weeks ago, I had imported some footage into Premiere Pro to experiment with. It was really just testing out some ideas for future work. Nothing I intended to save. After playing around a while, I decided some footage need to be in After Effects to achieve what I was trying to do. So, from Premiere, I selected some footage, right clicked, and choose "Replace with After Effects composition." This, of course, created a new After Effects project, which I saved in a different location under the name "Title Sequence". I worked only in AE for the next 3 weeks.

Last night, as I was nearing the end of the After Effects portion of the project, I decided to pop back into Premiere for the first time and start working on bringing other elements of the project together. Opening Premiere, I saw all the other iterations of the Premiere project from 3 weeks prior that I had created when I was experimenting with different approaches. At this point, it was really just crap I had no use for any longer. It was cluttering up my project folder, so I decided to delete all Premiere project files in this project folder and start fresh. After Effects was open with the Title Sequence project loaded at the time.

After I deleted the Premiere files, AE began to complain that it could no longer autosave. I tried to save Title Sequence manually, but it said the project file could not be located. I decided to exit the program without saving because I thought there was some sort of glitch happening and I didn't want to bake it into my project file permanently. I should have saved under a new, unique name. But, I really didn't think too much of it.

After relaunching AE, I discovered Title Sequence was gone from the project window. I navigated to the project folder for AE only to find that it no longer existed. I searched my hard drive thinking the files were simply in a different location than what I remembered. Nothing. Thinking I had perhaps accidentally deleted the After Effects files when I deleted the Premiere files previously, I checked the Recycle Bin. Not only were the AE project files not there, the Premiere project files I had intentionally deleted were not there either. All project files and folders associated with this project just up and vanished.


Potential Causes:
Now, I keep my footage located on a different set of hard drives than where I store my AE/PP project folders. I still have all my footage. I mention that because the only time I know of where Windows will delete something without putting it in the Recycle Bin is when files or folders are too large to feasibly put there - usually several gigs. Since my footage is in a different location, my AE/PP project folders are small - usually a couple megs, less than 100 megs for sure. So, I don't think that's the case.

I also thought perhaps this happened because I had originally used the "Replace with After Effects composition" option to create the AE Title Sequence project. I thought perhaps because I deleted the PP "parent" project, it went ahead and deleted the AE "child" project that went along with it. I conducted a little experiment setting up a scenario like that with a new test project and that didn't seem to be the case. Furthermore, whatever I deleted ended up in the Recycle Bin as expected.

So, I'm kind of at a loss. 3 weeks of work are gone and I have to start from scratch. It is what it is. But, I'd really like to understand what happened here so I can avoid it ever happening again.


EDIT:

General System Info:

AE CC 15.1.1
PP CC 12.1
W10 (Latest updates installed)
Nvidia GTX 980ti (Latest drivers)
16GB DDR4 RAM
Nvidia GTX 980ti
Samsung 960 EVO 500GB NVMe SSD (project folders, disk cache)
4x1TB HDD RAID10 (footage)

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

R
Community Expert
Rick GerardCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 13, 2018

Closing AE without saving a copy of the work was a big mistake. I assume that you emptied your trash, that you do not have a safe file management system in place, and that you keep no records of where you store things. That's a hard lesson to learn. If you are in business you should have at least a level 0 Raid system to store critical data like project files, you should be storing your cache files on a fast drive that is NOT in the same chain as your critical data files (like prproj projects and aep files) and you should have an archive for all footage that is safe and secure with well-organized file structures. I would think seriously about getting something like that organized and on paper and then follow your own rules religiously. All my critical files are also stored on DropBox and they have a way to recover files that have been deleted if you don't wait too long. This kind of organization requires that you go into the preferences of both After Effects and Premiere Pro and make some adjustments but it's pretty easy to do. Even when I'm editing in the field on a laptop I carry a portable Raid-0 drive to back up my work before I shut anything down, and within hours of shooting any footage or photos, I have 3 copies of everything, 1 in a Raid 0 drive and one on an external disk.

J
JazzMac251Author
Inspiring
July 13, 2018

I actually did not empty my trash. There were 3 items in there that I had deleted several days prior. The project files and folders, though, that were deleted minutes prior were nowhere to be found. That is odd.

It's interesting that you mention putting critical files on a RAID 0 array. I assume you meant RAID 10 and 0 was a typo? RAID 0 is for pure performance and offers no redundancy. If a single drive in your array fails, you lose all data. It's not recommended to keep critical data on RAID 0.


Your point about Dropbox is well taken.

My organizational system wasn't as terrible as you're implying, but I have streamlined it a bit. What bothers me is why the files just vanished. You delete something, it winds up in the Recycle Bin unless it's absolutely huge. These files and folders were relatively small. They contained no footage, hardly any audio previews. All in all, I'd say around 50MB worth of data. So, how could they have not wound up in the Bin like they should have? That is strange.

R
Community Expert
Rick GerardCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 13, 2018

Yes, typo. Redundant raid. I meant raid 1 + 0...

I have known of many cases where the Windows Recycle system has just given up on re-indexing and moving a large number of files, there is no warning and they never end up in the Recycle bin. That never happens on OSX because files are not actually moved unless you move them to another drive. Delete a file on OSX that is on a portable drive or a stick, remove it, then plug it back in even another Mac and the data is still in the Trash and can be recovered.

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