So I have been working on a song about 2-3 months now. The song has now around 50 tracks (incl. auxes). I opened the project today only to find that everything is gone....the trackview empty, no tracks or anything. The project folder still says 2GB, so the files are still there. I don't have any explanation for this. No-one other than me has access to my computer, and other projects are fine. Maybe the file got corrupted, or I did something stupid, or Sonar killed it when it crashed, as it does from time to time these days.  Luckily I take backup every night.
Always remember to take backups, people.
 

Hi. Have you checked that you did not archive or hide the tracks at some point? I have never had a project go empty on me, so I am just guessing.
All the best.

Zargg71
Hi. Have you checked that you did not archive or hide the tracks at some point? I have never had a project go empty on me, so I am just guessing.
All the best.

Thanks for the reply.
Track Manager is empty....also the cwp file has gone from 16MB to 155kb

pilutiful
Thanks for the reply.
Track Manager is empty....also the cwp file has gone from 16MB to 155kb

Man, that's scary!  I have never had that happen to me...  daily backups sure do come in handy don't they?  Just off the top of my head, the only thing I can quickly think of to cause something like that would be that if you had a brief power outage before the hard disk had a chance to flush the cache.

I am sure, however, you would have noticed something like that - lights flickering and all that.  Mind you, you may have a UPS. 

Maybe check your Windows system event viewer for any disk (or disk controller) anomalies.

pilutiful
Track Manager is empty....also the cwp file has gone from 16MB to 155kb

you might want to send the corrupted file to cake, they might be able to see what happened?

pwalpwal

pilutiful
Track Manager is empty....also the cwp file has gone from 16MB to 155kb

you might want to send the corrupted file to cake, they might be able to see what happened?

That could be interesting. How do I do that, through their support?

yes or sharing a dropbox (or somesuch) link might be better, as i believe support is quite difficult to hold of these days according to forum posts
good luck!

What's in the project folder where it was originally saved?

Bristol_Jonesey
What's in the project folder where it was originally saved?

nothing special (I think)...other cakewalk files, .assets and .tmp... also audio, melodyne and mixscenes folders

Files with a .tmp extension are not normally persistent in a project folder. A .tmp file could be the result of an aborted save attempt and would explain the truncated project file. I would also recommend against creating .asset files. The files are not used by SONAR anymore. To discontinue writing these files deselect "Save Asset Manifests with Project" in Preferences > File > Advanced