Premiere Pro 2021 Saved Project bin is EMPTY! My project is simply GONE!

[PZpix]

I'm not new to Premiere Pro.

I exported a rough cut last night after working on the project for the entire day (auto-saving every 5 minutes). 

I opened Premiere Pro and my project is not in the "recent" list, instead there appear random projects from weeks and months ago. I find the saved project in my documents and open it to find it BLANK! Project bin is completely empty. Not even one clip remains. Not the soundtrack, audio tracks, absolutely nothing. 

I can not afford to lose this project (this is several days of editing). This an absolute nightmare; my project is due and I have nothing. What is going on? Please help.

[R Neil Haugen]

I totally feely your pain! Been there myself once.

A bit of advice  that I was given in similar circumstances a few years back: never ever EVER trust any application's auto-save feature. ALWAYS do manual saves. Probably iterative Save-As is a good thing too. Save-a-Copy is another good thing to do.

Because that is the only way to guarantee you won't hit this problem. In PrPro, until you've saved a project, in my experience the autosaves may not save anything at all.

Neil

[PZpix]

Thank you, Niel, lesson learned!

Ali 

[Ann Bens]

FAQ: When to use "Save A Copy," or "Save As," or just "Save".

[Peru Bob]

Do you have backups?

I know it won't help you now (sorry), but please see Schofield's Second Law:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/follow-schofields-three-laws-of-computing-and-avoid-disasters/

[Averdahl]

I can not afford to lose this project (this is several days of editing).

By @PZpix

Have you opened the auto-saved project files? To find them, either search in any file browser for *.prproj (Look at the date of the files and you should be able to find them.)

Or, open the saved project and go to File > Project Settings > Scratch Disks to find the file path for Project Auto Save. Inside that folder the auto save files should be.

[pardon25587959ahth]

This helped, I simply did like you said and I located the saved

file. Thank you so much