Saves and auto-saves gone

[Russ Fairley]

Premiere 24.3.0

Mac OS 14.1.2

I had a new issue with Premiere. I suspect the new invisible auto-save had an issue of some sort. 

I've been working on the same project all week, using project file and footage on one external SSD and additional footage on a second ssd. I've been saving regularly without issue, and my auto-saves appeared to be being saved in the Auto-Save folder next to the project file. 

Last night I saved my project. I shut down Premiere and Media Encoder, and I ejected both hard drives. The additional footage drive ejected properly, but the other said it was in use. In Activity Monitor (Mac 14.1.2) there were still Adobe apps running, though the programs were closed. 

After waiting ten minutes and not having any luck getting the drive to eject I force ejected the drive and shut down. 

Today I started the machine, and opened the project and there are no files after May 14th - the project file and Auto-Save files somehow rolled back four days. I don't even know how this is possible - it's like the saves sat in a temp cache of some sort and then disappeared when I ejected the drive, but even that doesn't make sense. The saves were all successful, at least at a glance, when I made them. 

[Bruce Bullis]

When you say the autosave projects were somehow rolled back four days'...do you mean that the contents of those .prproj files was incorrectly dated? Did you mean that there are several days of autosave projects missing? 
Perhaps, due to [reasons], you're working from a stale local copy of a .prproj that you thought you were still editing, on that external SSD?

[Russ Fairley]

Hi Bruce, I mean that I worked on the project for the entire week, saving regularly. On the 18th I needed to shut down and move my physical machine somewhere else. The external drives didn't want to eject, and I can only assume an Adobe process was hung somewhere. I didn't bother to check, but it eventually ejected. When I reconnected the drives the project file and auto-saves were apparently last saved on the 14th. Auto-save had stopped saving, and even though Premiere was saved dozens of times, those saves didn't write to the drive.

[Bruce Bullis]

>The external drives didn't want to eject...I didn't bother to check, but it eventually ejected.

Yeah, that's one effective way of corrupting open files. 🙂

>When I reconnected the drives the project file and auto-saves were apparently last saved on the 14th.

What auto-save prefs were in place, on that system? 

>Auto-save had stopped saving, and even though Premiere was saved dozens of times, those saves didn't write to the drive.

Amazing, that's the first time such behavior has ever been reported. 

[Russ Fairley]

Haha, I'm not proud of my not checking for running processes. Usually I'll have issues with crashes, or if it's an external drive thing there might be a write permission issue, or a drive fails. This was new to me. 

Here are my auto-save settings:

[Bruce Bullis]

Ok, those settings should have been updating the .prproj file itself...

Confirming: In your auto-save directory, are there ~50 .prproj files, from May 14 or before? 

[Russ Fairley]

Oh, I added the "also saves the project file" toggle after the failuer.

Interestingly, there are 50 auto-save files that have been generated since starting back into the project, but there are also 20 auto-saves leading up to the 14th, so 70 total auto-saves. 

[Bruce Bullis]

50 + 20 = weird. 🙂

Are the 20 saving a similarly-named .prproj, from a new location?

[Russ Fairley]

The 20 just appear to be the old auto-saves, but I figured they'd be overwritten when I started working again. Here's a look at those saves - the 20 old ones are highlighted:

[Russ Fairley]

You can see I renamed my project file, but didn't change the auto-save location.

[Bruce Bullis]

The project names are interesting. We're curious about the "VMWare Cloud" involvement; is that just the name of the project, or is there some technological involvement with VMWare?

Are all these projects open-able (non-corrupt)?

[Russ Fairley]

Just the name of the project. I edit a lot of their training content.

Yes - I can open the older save files no problem. When my project file was missing a few days of updates I started my troubleshooting by checking the auto-saves and opening a few of them. I've still got the old project file, though there aren't really any clues with it. It opens fine, but doesn't include anything from after the 14th. I can email it to you - I'm not allowed to include any footage, but you can see which effects, etc., I used leading up to the issue. All of the footage is HD mp4 files.

[Bruce Bullis]

I'm glad the project name was about the actual content, and not some space-age file moving utility, or something. 🙂

If the .prproj opens for you, there's no need to send it. 

[Bruce Bullis · Accepted solution]

It sounds like things are back on track, so I'm closing this thread; if you encounter a situation where auto-saves seem like they're not auto-saving, please write back.

[Leo JP]

Hello, my friend who recently started editing with premiere is facing a similar problem and could really use some help... (I'm writing on behalf of him for he can only speak Japanese and I'm more experience with the software)

He had autosave turned on (FYI exact same setting as Russ's), edited for a few days (16th - 20th) while making sure to frequently manually save with "ctrl + s" as you would, and on the 20th his premiere crashed and upon opening the project again, he was met with a error message that stated that his project file was corrupted and that premiere had restored the file.

However, when he opened the said restored file his progress was rolled back a few days ago, and to see if he could recover his progress he checked the autosave file and found that the autosave files through 16th to the 20th were specifically missing. 
He also stated that he did not accidentaly save his progress to a newly created copy of the file he was working on (which some beginners do), so I am out of clues in terms of what may have caused this and how to get his progression back.

He JUST started his journey on premiere and I don't want him being discouraged with losing hard earned progression. If anybody could help, I'd greatly appreciate it...!

[Russ Fairley]

Haha, nope, nothing fancy. The folks in the videos talk endlessly about space-age file moving utilities, but I usually just have a couple of SSDs connected to a laptop or desktop. 🙂

[Russ Fairley]

Will do. Thanks, Bruce. I've got a quiet week next week, so I'll see if I can replicate it with the old save file once this project is wrapped. I appreciate your time!

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi @Russ Fairley,

I moved your post to the Discussions forum for further troubleshooting if you need it. Thanks for all the info you gave about your case. It is really appreciated!

Take Care,

Kevin