aglewis723
I do use the auto-save feature, just that these synths were frozen about 2 months ago;  I just unfroze them now, so all backups when the synths were not frozen are gone :(
 
Anyway, it is all different synths, some NI, Z3TA, Korg, etc....
 
Sooo pissed right now.  It shouldn't work like this.    Anyway, thanks for all your support.

Agreed that it shouldn't happen...
emwhy just mention how something similar can happen with the Korg Legacy synths.
(By not actually selecting the patch and closing the browser)
 
To ensure this doesn't happen again, I'd suggest (as have others) using Sonar's "Save As" function.
When I'm working on something important, I save incremental copies (just in case).
That saves me from potential bugs... as well as provides a means to go "back in time" in case later changes weren't for the better.  Project files are small.

That should never have happened.  What's the point of freezing a track if you can't safely unfreeze it at a later time?  If you wanted to permanently render it,  you would have just bounced it to audio. Did you contact tech support? Something definitely went wrong,  and I don't believe it was your fault.

neirbod
Sorry but I find these "you should have backed up" replies off base and bit condescending.  If this happened to me I'd be pissed off as well.  Yes we should all back up frequently.  But if the error occurred as he described, and a simple freeze then unfreeze wiped out all of his changes, this speaks to a larger problem.  It is curious that others have not been able to replicate it.  But I have seen *many* instances where Sonar has an intermittent bug that takes a while to pin down the exact steps to replicate.  Just perhaps the OP found a real, and quite significant, bug that requires attention beyond backing up his files more frequently.

Please understand - I in NO way meant to be condescending, in fact, I had posted quite a bit of content on different layers of backing up - in an effort to assist.
 
Nothing could be done to recover the lost data.  The best that could be done was to reinforce setting up and using backups and possibly using auto-save to provide an additional level of protection, to prevent this from occurring again for him.
 
The fact that something weird and unexpected DID cause the data to get wiped out is not a good thing - and I agree that there is potentially something else going on that would be good to ferret out and resolve, but the general thrust of the OP was that Sonar was to blame for him losing hours of work, when he could have, and should have, been able to recover in literally a handful of minutes by restoring from a saved version.
 
Things DO weird out in hardware and in software, and projects DO get corrupted.
 
This is PRECISELY why backups are so critical, and precisely why so many different folks chimed in to reinforce that concept.  Not to attack or belittle, or be condescending - trying to help him avoid having to go through something like that again in the future.  :)
 
I truly do feel empathy for his having lost hours of work. 
 
At the same time, I do not agree that the situation is Sonar's fault, regardless of the source of the error condition that resulted in the loss of the data.  The ORIGINAL problem is that critical work was performed and not saved or backed up, and this is what caused the loss of so much work.  ANY error condition, whether or not it was a blip in Windows, a driver issue, some background service problem, or a loss of power to the computer, would have produced the same results - the inability to recover the work because it had not been saved.
 
Bob Bone
 
 

John T

paulo
 
 
I don't share the love for autosave as I like to choose when saves are made and wouldn't want it to kick in when I had just messed something up. It also gives me the opportunity to just close a project without saving if I have screwed something up and revert back to how it was.

It doesn't work how you're assuming. If you have autosave on, all the autosaves go to a seperate version of the project called "Auto-save copy of ******". Your main project is only saved when you manually save.
 
Auto-saves are there for you to pull up after crashes or other problems. They never replace your current working file.

Ok thanks, I didn't realise that.

kb420
 
 
I agree.  Often,  on this forum,  many members take a "it's not Sonar, it must be the user" stance.  It creates a very combative environment where there really needn't be.

Maybe that's because the people who are trying to help the person in question are doing the very same thing with the very same software and not having the same problem ? Like it or not, that does tend to point to there being something different about the set-up / methods of the person having the problem. Not always, but in cases where the OP gives very little info about a peculiar problem, there is not much else to go on other than trying to recreate the problem. If you can't, stating that "I have just tried it and it works fine here" isn't combative, it's stating a fact which may help the person with the problem get to the cause of the problem quicker. I asked the OP if it affected his back up copy because I want to find out for my own purposes if that's what happens as I freeze synths and make back-ups all the time assuming that if the worst happens, my back up copies will be fine. 
 
It could be argued that chiming in on a post and having a go at the people trying to help without actually offering any insight or help yourself is in fact more likely to cause friction. I, of course, respect your right to that ! ;)
 
 

When glitches happen and files go haywire.... it's usually the drivers not jiving right or the underlying OS windows platform screwing up.
 
Certainly Sonar can also create issues but I find that Sonar on my DAW is pretty solid.
 
In every FX and synth I own,  I am reasonably sure that there is an option to save a given patch or setting as a preset. I know this to be the case because I use it a bunch on the cakewalk EQ & reverbs as well as on Ozone and a number of other FX and VST's.... save the settings as a preset and you can instantly recall it from inside that plug in at any future time. I use them that way all the time and start 99% of the time from an existing custom preset.
 
If you're not using this function, you are missing out on a great way to work. I hate the thought of having to start every project from square one with the plugs...... saving the presets fixes that.
 
 

I didn't take anything in the thread as being a beat down.
 
I certainly meant no offense to the OP or anyone else, and I also did not discount whatever issue caused the data to get wiped out in the first place.
 
I did indicate empathy for the frustration the OP feels, and meant that.
 
All of those who posted on the idea of the backups meant that in a helpful way - no mocking or anything like that.  I think it is safe to say ALL of us have scar tissue from getting our selves scorched by failing to do our OWN backups, and it is from those collective experiences that we posted what we did.  :)
 
Bob Bone
 

aglewis723
I do use the auto-save feature, just that these synths were frozen about 2 months ago;  I just unfroze them now, so all backups when the synths were not frozen are gone...

Autosave obviously has no relevance to the problem.  Why do people keep bringing it up?

Kev999 - that was how I USED to be, until I lost a bunch of them and had to rebuild a bunch of Konakt multi-racks and redo all the assignments and midi channels and all of that.
 
Now, I simply create and save presets when I load things into projects and get the sounds dialed in.
 
It's just insulation against having to go through all of that other junk again.  :)
 
Bob Bone
 

Kev999

brundlefly
Saving patches in progress as new presets is as important as saving projects.

Very true.  But how many of us bother to do this?  I save a patch whenever I believe I may later want to re-use it.  I don't save patches routinely though, but it would be wise to do so.

A Bob and others have mentioned, a lot of "good habits" tend to be the end result of "trial by fire" as it were. Just about everyone doesn't normally do "this or that" until they get burned. Many folks try to suggest things so others do not need to experience it themselves.

I think its a sign how much more reliable technology is getting if people are forgetting to save. 20 years ago you learnt that lesson generally within the first day of using any software (the quick way!).

This has happened to me on more than one occasion. It is pretty soul destroying. There was a recent thread Noel was on in which we talked about how since the project file saves the preset info for synths that it would be great to make that "readable" or otherwise accessible. A readable option AND an export option would be the final piece for futureproofing projects. I lost all the sounds for an EDM track (y'know, where that stuff is paramount) and spent the better part of a year slowly reconstructing the song. It. Is. Terrible.
 
Of course we all know the best course is to save your presets, save them again as external preset files, backup the project files two hundred times etc. But I'm still baffled that we can't get better diagnostic tools that are obviously already present as part of the asset mgmt arsenal. Someday we'll all need to go crawling back through an old project, after several DAW rebuilds, and have missing data that is actually pretty easy to recreate if we could just access the frickin' info already present in the files. It's baffling.
 

aglewis723
I do use the auto-save feature, just that these synths were frozen about 2 months ago;  I just unfroze them now, so all backups when the synths were not frozen are gone :(
Anyway, it is all different synths, some NI, Z3TA, Korg, etc....

 
I think there is potentially some significant information there. The project was saved in an earlier build of X3 prior to X3E. Was it saved in X3D? If you remember there was a problem where certain plugins would lose settings when saving and reloading that we resolved in X3E. If the project was frozen when saved in the bad state its could exhibit this problem. That would explain why the problem doesn't happen to anyone else in X3E.
The root issue in X3D was that when loading we started respecting the current program number. Since some plugins incorrectly manage the current program state when it is changed from the plugin UI, it started causing SONAR to load the incorrect program when reloading. This was worked around and fixed in X3E so you should not see that behavior anymore. However if a project was saved in X3D it could have the problem.
 
Here is something to try. Try loading your bad project in X2 (or an earlier version of SONAR if you have it available) and then unfreeze the synth there. My theory is that the preset may load OK there. Let me know. 
Also try to repeat the problem in X3E with this same project - change the synth preset, modify it and then freeze and unfreeze the track. It should now unfreeze and properly retain the settings as it was before the freeze. 
 

I was wondering if the OP had saved the project in an earlier SONAR version, given the fact that the project was saved 2 months ago.  The last few posts just identified that. 
 
This will be a hard problem to duplicate, as you cannot have SONAR X3d if you've updated to X3e on the same machine, correct?