This problem has come up several times for me over the years. The last time it took out my entire album's worth of synth preset info for my projects, which meant even though I could eventually rescue a project it had the right VSTi's in place but with none of their patch/preset info. It took me over a year to rebuild those projects and in that time it came up that even though that info is saved with a project there's no real way to access it or use it to help rescue project sounds.
 
Here's the current hangup that reminded me of this: I just updated Z3ta 2 because, well heck there's an update! The very first project that has Z3ta 2 installed on it I open now has lost it's patch data. Z3ta shows up in the track, there's MIDI data in the track, but no patch info. Now the project probably has the ability to tell me the preset name...or the bank/preset #, SONAR saves it after all. But we can't see it. Or change it. 
 
 

http://forum.cakewalk.com/Kingston-alert-m3322157.aspx
 
 

Although you shouldn't have to deal with these kinds of problems, I write down patch names for any patches I use in the Track notepad. For hardware synths, I save the sys ex (which SONAR does very well). I try to make projects as self-contained as possible in terms of describing the various elements used within a project. You never know...see Tip of the Week #66 for more information. 

There was a feature request recently for this: http://forum.cakewalk.com/Snapshot-all-plugin-states-m3313545.aspx
 
More generally, I wish Sonar would move towards a more human-readable project format so that we can extract this information more easily.

Good points.   Sonar has forced me to go with a fairly rigid set of about 2000? patch identifiers, 127 for violins, 127 for violas, 127 for solo violins, maybe 60 each for the wood winds, etc etc etc.   So all sonar sees is a bank and patch number, "Generic Midi" and my bookkeeping has to be outside of sonar.     Would be a really nice feature to allow "instrument lists" to be applied to VST instruments ... since if I had purchased a hardware synth, I'd probably be able to look up a ins file for the synth ... in fact I used to have one for a Kurzweil 2600, several hundred names including some made up by me, all nice and organized.   

I think I know what you are talking about. I actually go out of my way to save new presets for project specific synth patches and plugin settings once I get them how I like. That way I can pull them up whenever I need to even if I start from scratch.
 
Of course this works best for plugins that allow you to create little folders to put groups of sounds/effects settings into. Ones that use one big global folder... well that gets messy but in that case I start the patch name with the project/song name then the track number/name/thing I applied it to.
 
Then I can drag those up from memory into new projects... and rename them again.
 
As I tweak them I will save to overwrite if they get better or add a date/version number so I can call up previous versions of my tweaks.
 
Kind of convoluted but it works and works across projects. For plugs/synths that allow exporting of preset banks I can back them up of move them to another system (or even send them to other users).
 
I would like to figure out a way to do that type of stuff on tools that DON'T have a built in export system but am currently too stoopid.

I try save everything as Track Templates... if I remember... and then I have to deal with Sonar being rather buggy when it comes to importing them again. C'est la vie.

Thanks for the advice and tips folks, appreciated.
 
Still, though, it's a gap in the feature set that has caused me problems several times over the years. Wish there was an elegant solution. Just a "batch patch snapshot" or something!