Project and autosaves corrupted - Please help to find cause

Report · Aug 22, 2018

Hi,

A project created with Premiere Pro CC2018 on a iMac Pro running High Sierra was working fine yesterday, but all the today's autosaves and the actual project are corrupted and would not be opened.

An out of sleep crash of the mac forced us to re-open the project and we have noticed the errror ("an unknown error occured while opening the project").

Checking the autosaves, all the yesterday's autosave are fine but even the today's first one is corrupted.

Could not import project either. Opening prproj with a text editor (Sublime Text in my case) shows that the file is filled with zeros (compared to an actual working project where we can see that there are random data which should correspond to the premiere's way to encode the project).

I know that it will be difficult or impossible to retrieve today's data, but I want to make sure that it will not happend again in this working environment.

Does anyone would have an idea to what may be leading to that ?

Kind regards.

Report · Aug 22, 2018

Don't know what caused that, however ... I do sincerely hope you're not assuming auto-saves are any useful backup system. They can't be ... as I found out to my horror years back when I first started. Auto-saves have a limited number set, then they over-write earlier ones. If corruption gets in, depending on your settings, within 1-3 hours every autosave will be screwed.

So ... yea, have them on. BUT!

Every few minutes, for any project you're doing major work in, do iterative save-as saves and continue in the new iteration. You ALWAYS have project files for a way back.

Also, save a copy to other locations.

Neil

Report · Aug 22, 2018

Save and auto save is not enough.

You also need to make Save a Copy to a preferably different drive in case former goes corrupt.

Auto save overwrites copies, Save a copy does not.

Report · Aug 23, 2018

Thanks for your answers.

I will continue to find possible cause, and in the meantime we will back up the projects' progression with Save a Copy.

Paul