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After the last Premiere Update all of my Projects I ever did are gone from the storage on my advice, nowhere to find. I've already been searching everywhere, what can I do to get my Projects back?
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An update never deletes project files from the hard drive/s. If the Preferences are deleted during uninstall/install the projects will indeed disappear from the start dialog, but the physical project files have been left untouched on the hard drive/s.
When you say "I've already been searching everywhere" i assume that you have used a file browser such as Windows Explorer of Finder and searched, not just browsed, for *.prproj on all hard drives and not just one. Correct?
There is a search function in all file browsers.
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I know that it's impossible but fact is, that my data is nowhere to be found, no matter what I'm trying...
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no matter what I'm trying...
Don´t get me wrong here, but what are you trying? 🙂 Do you know more precise where you saved them on your laptop, iow on the Desktop or in a dedicated folder or?
What OS are you on, Windows or Mac OSX?
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I'm using Windows and I know where I've been saving them and they aren't there anymore and with looking everywhere I mean even in the trash folder, in case I deleted ecerything on accidant
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Where did you originally save them?
Are they on an external drive that is not now connected to the computer?
Do you have backups or autosaves?
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I did only save them on my Laptop's internal drive without backups or autosaves. I know, it's silly, I now learned.
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Did they get moved by accident to another folder?
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I'm didn't, because I've already been looking in literally every folder on my computer and my external hard drive
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As i wrote before, use the search feature in the file browser you use. By doing that you can search for files with the ending .prproj. Those are the files you are looking for.
You can spend decades if you just randomly look for files in folders. Use the search function and find all of the files within minutes. If you don´t know how-to, press F1 for help or do a Google search. The help is there, just listen to it.
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Ive never seen anything like it. I had the same thing happen this week. After the update I am missing finished sequences from projects. These are finished sequences that i saved constantly some where completely finished. The sequence file is there but nothing on the timeline.
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dvcurtis, make sure you don't have anything in the search field of the bin/project panel. If you do, you won't see anything that doesn't have that text in it. When I first started using Premiere, I thought I'd lost all my work...
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This is a real thing. I work for IT in a school and this happens. Yes, we use Explorer search for prproj files and they are gone. What I believe happens is that Premiere's default save path is the folder it's installed in, but when a new Premiere version rolls out it re-creates the install folder and repopulates with its install files, thus removing whatever was saved in there. I've never been able to recover the users' files either logged in as the user or as an admin. My only theory on a fix would be to lock the Adobe install folders to users but allow Adobe to have rights to it, but this should be something Adobe adjusts from their end rather than forcing the entire world of users paying high per-user monthly subscription fees to figure out on their own because they enacted very poor policies.
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Is the theory presented by @ajlq possible?
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First of all, Always turn on autosave... Second of all, always locate your autosave folder on a different physical drive from the drive your project is saved on. Very basic stuff not only for Premiere but for almost every program in the universe... The fact is EVERY DRIVE WILL FAIL... IT'S NOT A QUESTION OF "IF," IT'S A QUESTION OF WHEN. And even SSD have a limited number of read-writes. I keep my projects in a folder that's automatically mirrored on Dropbox... And as horrible as the situation may seem, rebuilding something is always quicker that the first build...
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This is always solid advice. But we're not talking about drive failure here--we're discussing Adobe updates destroying files. Regardless of drive failure risks, Adobe updates should not adhere to a process that intentionally destroys user folder contents, especially if the default save path is that folder.
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I agree, however, if the users drive failed as is quite possible, they'd be in the same position. And this is clearly a very rare occurence or we'd see many more posts about it here. ajlq, wondering if there's something imposed by the school network that's creating this vulnerability...
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Agreed. Many poor user decisions or other processes can kill user files. Let's not have Adobe processes be one of those things.
If you Google this issue (as I did to find this post), I'm confident you'll find this issue to be not exclusive to my location.
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I will ask the team about it, Bob. Thanks for flagging me.
Kevin
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Hi @ajlq,
I investigated this case by asking engineering about the issue. They wrote the following reply:
We don’t touch the original project when we upgrade and never save projects by default into the install location. That is not possible, unless you are running as Admin. The project default save location is User/Documents/Adobe/[Premiere Pro Version]. A new major version will not overwrite the old version. We never delete anything on install in the user area unless they tell us to delete the prefs. We do not delete any user content when we uninstall an old version (which can happen on upgrade optionally).
I hope the reply from engineering helps. Let me know if I can have any other of your questions answered.
Thanks,
Kevin
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Thank you! That is indeed the path that has issues. Unfortunately I just have to go by my users' reports when their files have disappeared from there, and it always coincides with an Premiere full version update. I don't have anything else to go on, as to why the files saved to that location are lost at that time. I'd hoped it was just deletion of the prefs that meant their shortcuts to recent files were deleted, but no, the actual files are gone. Without running a full-scale incremental backup to the folders on all devices or some other extreme solution (which would involve resources we don't have) I just have to hope that Adobe has enough users reporting the issue that it gets tracked down and resolved. For now I just continue badgering users to never save files on any C drive EVER--in fact in that room we even have signs above every computer to parlay that message--but users do as users do!