Save project did not work

[Reyer]

Hi,

Yesterday something very frustrating happened with Premiere Elements 2020.
I started a new project and had been working on it for more than 4 hours.

I clicked Save at least once every 15 minutes.
There were no errors during the save.
When I wanted to export the project to an MP4 file the progress bar didn't show anything.

Therefor I stopped PE and restarted it.

I reopened my project and discovered that it had the status from several hours ago.
90% of the work was lost! That didn't improve my mood, to put it mildly.

I don't know what happened. I've never seen that before.

In the auto save folder there was nothing, no files at all for this project.

I saved the project as a different name and in a different folder and had to redo the 90%.

I also reopened the file with the problem and it still does not save any change.

Any ideas how to prevent this in future projects, except for checking the date of  the project file after each save?

kind regards,
Reyer
The Netherlands.

[Peru Bob]

Did you save them to an external drive?

[Reyer]

No, it's an internal drive (SSD).

[Reyer]

I could send you the project file if that helps.

[Peru Bob]

Try resetting the preferences:

Hold down Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) while the application is starting.

[Reyer]

Thanks for yor help.

I finally found the cause of the problem.
There was not enough free space on the drive.
But it's still strange that Premiere Elements does not give me an error or warning when it does not save the project. Could that be a ticket for the developers?

[Bill Sprague]

Video editors, including Premiere Elements, need a lot of clean drive space.  They use it for things like the rendered preview files that make editing possible.  Spinning drives need enough so there are chunks of unfragmented space.  Even small projects will do better if there is about 50 GB available.  Solid state drives work better and faster, so maybe less free space is needed.  

[Reyer]

Thanks Bill for the information.

Do you think it's feasible for the developers to give the user an error message or warning when there is too little drive space left?

[Peru Bob]

It would seem that a warning should be triggered.