Premiere Pro Projects Missing

[elliceel16]

So recenlty I opened my premier pro and saw that some of my projects where missing. I went to auto save and they weren't there but I do remember saving each projects and have open the projects within the last 24 hours. Projects from 8-9 days ago are in the recent files but not the ones from 5-6 days ago which there were 4 projects.

[Peru Bob]

Are they on your hard drive?

[elliceel16]

No, they were. saved to a file on my computer. I did not have them saved on a hard drive

[elliceel16]

How ever when going deep into my computer I found folders with the missing project but it wasn't the project itself. There were rendered files of some of my work I saw like clips and videos.

[salvo34]

it's complicated.

in general you edit stuff with source material on hard drive ( or ssd whatever, hopefully internal drives). Then you export your product ( usually to hd internal). that process means you got cache files, export files and source files.

If you know how to use computer you can delete project, save export, and eventually delete cache. They are all different.

[Michael Grenadier]

one thing to try is searching your computer for files that include ".prproj". things can get saved to the wrong place if you're not paying attention.  I've got a folder on my computer for premiere projects that automatically gets uploaded to dropbox.  just another layer of safety.

[elliceel16]

I still can't find them when I search them. It was my last four recent projects. Two of them I was still working on. However I exported them and exported them to the media encoder to be downloaded which they were. When looking at the logs in my the media encoder I can find the project name but cant find where they are located.

[Michael Grenadier]

we see these kind of posts rarely and since most of the experts (and I include myself in this category, egotistical jerk that I can be...). as far as I know have never had this happen to them, there's a tendency to dismiss them as being caused by operator error.  And frankly, we've all made enough mistakes ourselves that it certainly doesn't seem impossible.  But you haven't told us anything about your system which might give us some clues.  Please tell us your system specs: OS version, Premiere version, amount of RAM, Hardware specs including graphics card.  Hard drives are not infallible and data can get corrupted.  Are you working with networked drives?  could be an issue.

Many of the gurus here recommend regularly doing a "save as" so you have a new project name.  This also preserves your recent autosaves from the previous file name.  Probably not a bad idea to check your autosave folder occasionally and to back up your project to another drive (or in my case, dropbox).  I have a client who does some editing on her projects and I insist she does a save as at the beginning of each day and emails me the project at the end of her edit.  She's a loose cannon to say the least but our workflow has been fairly smooth.  Maybe someone else will come up with some other ideas but please provide the info I've requested...