Unfortunately, I reported this same issue here recently and couldn’t make any progress toward a solution.
I lost an enormous amount of work hours. It’s unfair.
I recommend saving the project file that does open into a separate folder, away from the rest.
What I did to avoid falling too far behind was to review each auto-save of that project one by one, making a copy of each before opening it. I have Premiere Pro (Beta) set to auto-save every 2 minutes, so I had to go through a lot of files. Remember to run tests without touching the originals: manually create copies of everything and use those for testing.
Here’s what I discovered during the process
1. There are two kinds of corrupt files:
A) those that don’t open at all;
B) those that do open and let you view/edit, but as soon as you save or rename them, they become unusable and will never open again. That’s why I insist on never testing with the originals.
For example, in my case the corrupt file was number 140 (in my Auto-Saves folder), and the last good one was 139. The difference between them was 2 minutes. No matter how hard I looked in 139 for what could have caused the error, I couldn’t find it. So I had to pick up from 139 even though there were auto-saves up to 500 and all of those were corrupt. My steps were:
1. I identified the earliest files and checked their modified date and time to get an idea of where I was in the edit. I randomly started testing from file “020” (not the original, remember).
2. Once I could open it, I moved a text layer or some element on the timeline and saved. Then I closed and reopened. After confirming it let me save, I saved it again with a custom name. I saved again, closed, and reopened. If it kept working, I knew that file wasn’t corrupt.
I repeated these steps one by one with all of them until I reached the one right before the corrupt file.
From there on, I started saving my edit manually with a base name (for example, “Edition_1_Beta”), and every 10 minutes or whenever I did something complex, I saved a new version by incrementing the number: “Edition_2_Beta.” Then I closed the project and reopened “2” to make sure it wasn’t corrupt, and continued editing. An immeasurable waste of time, but it’s what I had to do to finish the project I’d already started.
I recently suggested that those of us testing Beta builds should have stronger safeguards, because in my case, once I finish this project (which I should’ve delivered 3 days ago), I won’t want to open the Beta again. I lost time, I missed client deadlines, and I lost unrecoverable files.
I know people often say not to do important work in Beta, but then how are we supposed to test Adobe’s new features? We don’t have the spare time to build a fully “fake” real-world edit just to find bugs and report them. It’s unfortunate, and once again, there should be a way to test Betas with real edits without risking project loss on every update. And if Adobe can’t offer that, I suggest adding a much more specific warning stating that we could irretrievably lose everything we do there, that there may be no way to recover anything, and that it’s entirely at our own risk. With that clarity, many people would avoid brutal headaches.
Stay strong. I hope you can recover at least part of what you lost.
P.S.: This message was translated from Spanish; please excuse any odd phrasing you may notice.
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