psd file disappeared - mac - external drive

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
September 30, 2019
5 replies
1411 views

I just cant accept the fact that on 2am tonight, I lost the file I have been working on all day. I hope for any help or enlighenment.

I am working on a psd composition in Photoshop and I have been saving the file regularly, on my external hard drive. Generally, I have to quit Photoshop and right away then reopen it, every 1-2 hours, as my scratch disk gets full (if that makes any sense). This last time, I decided to quit it and I hit the 'not save' button, on the window asking me if i want to save my file or not. And that was it. When I went back to reopen my file, it was gone from my recent files and completely disappeared from my external hard drive.

I can recall that it has happened once again in the past, again when i chose to not save the progress and just quit photoshop. All the other times that I hit 'save' when the window with the question "do you want to save" kind of, appears, the file stays in the folder and everythings fine. So does anyone know, what could be wrong? Any way to find the gone file ? Is there something that I am missing?

Thank you in advance.

E.

This topic has been closed for replies.

NB, colourmanagement

Community Expert

Hi, can you search on your whole system for the file by name?

Could it be saved on your internal drive inadvertantly?

Always worth saving incremental files but I realise this is boltingn the stable after the horse has bolted.

Oh dear how frustrating

I hope this helps

if so, please "like" my replythanks

neil barstow, colourmanagement

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

Do you do incremental saves? Or are you always overwriting the one and only, not backed up, copy of yout file?

adventurous_Giggles5D2BAuthor

Participating Frequently

Not always but in this case, yes. No back up, no copy, not uploaded anywhere. I am not sure what an incremental save is ? But I was just saving (like cmd+s) the file every now and then.

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

It is a good plan to expect that sometimes Save will fail and leave you with no file. This can happen at obvious times (e.g. if there is a power failure) and because of software issues. The trick is to protect yourself with incremental saves (as well as backups at least daily). What is an incremental save? Simply, saving lots of copies. At its simplest you save FILE 1, FILE 2, FILE 3 and so forth (probably making a folder for the design's files). This not only protects you against losing a file, it protects you against making a mistake which you only find out later. Of course, to be properly protected the saves need to be to more than one disk, which is what backups are about. A pain, but not so painful as losing work...