Sonar Destroyed My Song (Thanks Cakewalk!)

I take it you didn't bother to save anything before you froze things. I suppose that you didn't bother to save the custom patches you made either? 
 
I like to use save as for being able to going back and having a project I haven't screwed up available. 

Had you saved the project before freezing? The synth settings are saved with the file when you save it. I'll try freezing/iunfreezing before and after saving a project to see what happens, and report back.
 
 

Remember too that freezing doesn't freeze the synth. It renders the audio from the synth, based on whatever the current patch in RAM is at the time of freezing.

I'm so particular about saving that I've set up a Windows server that not only backs up the OS on my computers but my project folders as well. Then twice each day that server does a backup of everything it has been backing up. This is just an old PC with a bunch of big hdd and Windows Home Server 2011.

I've lost data and swore never would again if I could help it. Save often save smart. And above all, never take it for granted.

Kev999
After every editing session in Sonar, I make a backup copy of the CWP file.  It's normally only around 2MB in size, so drive space is not an issue.  I don't usually bother copying the audio folder, as it's rare that I ever need to retrieve lost audio.  For me, it's less about risk of data corruption and more about preserving the history of the project's development.  Projects evolve through thousands of changes, so it's useful to be able to revisit earlier versions to backtrack on something.

Exactly! I can say I have made a total mess of  project and if it weren't for a strategic project save as at the proper time I would have nobody but myself to blame.  

SONAR may have destroyed your RECORDING but not your SONG.
 
The RECORDING is simply a snapshot in time of how it sounded when you committed it to recordable media
The SONG will live in your heart forever and may mature like a good wine or a crusty old wino.
 
Or something.

I am truly sorry that for whatever reason you may have lost several hours of work.
 
Many of us have learned this EXTREMELY painful lesson the hard way.  Backups are a critical part of success as a recording engineer.
 
 
I hope this is the first and the last time you face this situation, and that you for the rest of time save after each important segment of a given project is achieved, whether that is a killer guitar solo from a visiting legend, a once in a lifetime capture of a live performance, or that perfect new sound you spent hours working up.  And, I hope that you have or now accept that even this is only PART of the process, in that even your local copy of data is not secure, and that you additionally back things up externally, and further consider periodic offsite storage of system image and full data backups.
 
I also have a tendency to make a temporary backup of any project I am about to work on - the whole project folder, immediately prior to beginning work for any particular session.  Such a backup is a matter of a couple of minutes at most to accomplish, and protects against catastrophic corruption of the entire project.  This is in addition to saving the project after each and every significant task during any session is accomplished, like after any 'keeper' live-played clips or significant edits.
 
The earlier posted advice is stated about as eloquently as I have ever seen, about saving or backing up - "Whenever you've done something you don't want to lose." 
 
I was the database administrator for a major mid-western university for a number of years, and one day some construction Einsteins managed to cut through the main power grid feed for literally a quarter of the downtown section of the city.  LITERALLY in the blink of an eye, we lost power to not only the mainframe, but also to the emergency backup generators on the roof.  The temperature got so hot so quick that some of the solder on the circuit boards of the mainframe melted.
 
No problem - get the replacement parts and use the built-in processes we had to recover everything except in-flight data - only small bits of data that were in between hitting the save button and the saved data being written to both the database and to separate physical tape as a backup.
 
Well, this was our lucky day.  the backup media was bad, so we went to our backup plan to that plan, which was called forward recovery, where you restore the database to its state from the beginning of that day, and reapply all logged transactions that had been written to yet another separate physical tape.  Well, THAT tape was bad.
 
It was ONLY because we also had an additional disk log file that was a backup to the backup which was itself a backup to the main backup that we were able to reconstruct almost all of the 'lost' data.
 
We would have faced legal consequences had we not had those levels of backups in place, and procedures defined and thoroughly tested to recover from exactly that kind of situation.  (we actually had 3 more levels of backups on top of the 3 above levels - daily incremental backups of the entire database kept offsite, an additional set of weekly full system-wide backups kept offsite at yet a different physical location, where the delivery drivers contractually took different driving routes each week, and a last resort offsite set of monthly full system-wide backups done in the same manner to yet another physical location.
 
Now, the above is overkill for our purposes of recording sessions, but the point is that you either put in place a set of backups that contain enough levels to meet realistic needs, or you WILL at some point lose some amount of critical data.
 
For MY backup plan for my recording data I:
 
1.  Backup any existing project folder I am about to work on, immediately prior to starting to work on it.
2.  During a session in Sonar for the given project, anytime I complete some recording or editing task - at the clip level, or as makes sense for whatever task I have just completed, I hit CTRL+S to save that work.
3.  If for a given session for the project I have done enough complex or significant things to make me nervous, I will take a few minutes and close the project and again save a copy of the entire project folder, or if I had only been working with midi data I will save off the project file and not the audio folder (because it was already backup up prior to the session and nothing had changed in it).
4.  After finishing the session for the day, I take another full backup of the project folder, which is saved to a different physical drive than the one the project lives on.
 
I have additional processes in place for nightly, weekly, and monthly backups.
 
I will nearly certainly NEVER lose more than a tiny section of a single session - literally my general exposure is only to potentially lose a single edit task for a single clip.  I expect to NEVER lose an entire project, unless my computer, my car, and the cloud are all destroyed, in which case I think I would have more to worry about than a Sonar project.  
 
I keep a DVD OS image and an external drive with a monthly full data backup of my entire system - including sample libraries and all data files - in my car, and nightly I backup currently worked on project folders to the cloud - and this is in addition to the external drive attached to the system and the local copies on the hard drive.
 
It takes discipline and commitment to set up and follow backup procedures, but the PITA of developing and following those pales in comparison to the pain of potentially losing something irreplaceable from NOT having set up and followed backup/recovery procedures.
 
Bob Bone
 
 

Like Bob said, a lot of us has had this happen. And that's why a lot of us are telling you to back up. Hopefully we can pass on what we have learned to you, or others, so that it doesn't happen again.
 
I have auto save set up to save every 20 changes. So after I do anything 20 times, it auto saves. This way I can go back to a least a few minutes ago and retrieve my work. If you had done this, I wouldn't be answering this post.
 
Again, I know how you feel about loosing work that you created, liked, and was inspired by. Wish it didn't happen. But it did. Back up!!! Save As!! Ctrl + s!!

Guitarhacker
 
 
SAVE OFTEN. That can not be stated often enough. I don't use the auto save..... I simply make it part of the process to save manually.
 
 

This can not be said enough!! SAVE OFTEN!!
 
I use auto save. I have mine set for "after so many changes" and "not after so much time"
 
This way I am not in the middle of something and it saves.

robert_e_bone
...suggest that you change the title of your thread, considering YOU chose not to use auto-save, which was thoughtfully provided by Cakewalk
 
Bob Bone

I thought to ask the same. But I figured that the more people get to read this and learn from our mistakes, it may help!!
 

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.

Hello Everyone,

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.
 
I wont kill myself Bitflipper :)
 
-Adam

I have noticed sometimes effects will lose their settings - but this was on some earlier versions of SONAR.  With earlier versions of X sometimes SONAR would freeze up or not open the last file I worked on.  I think that was some kind of interference from my interface.  A couple of songs I had to open the old version of the song.
 
The real trick is, of course, to save patches and effects settings as individual files, and save often, and then back up.  I can tell I don't do it enough.
 
Also, whether it is PC or Mac, computers belch.  Nature of the beast.  I know it doesn't help now, but stuff happens.  I'm actually surprised that it doesn't more often, or our complete virtual world doesn't just stop working someday.  When something doesn't work that should and there seems to be no reason it shouldn't, it calls into question this whole digital pyramid we balance on top of.
 
@

These were softsynths in the rack.  I am on Sonar X3e, everything is up to date.
 
I dont have a copy from 2 months ago before I froze the synths.   All diff synths from different manufacturers are effected.   

I do a lot of synth work and freezing in my projects. Here's what I do know:
 
1 Certain Native Instruments synths like Kontakt will not always retaine their presets after freezing. This applies to Guitar Rig also.
 
2. Some synths (KORG Legacy) can screw you if you select a preset and audition it from the browser before actually committing to that preset. Unfreezing will lose that preset.
 
As for X3e, I have had zero problems freezing synths knowing that two of those above mentioned soft synths will lose their data. Sorry this happened to you, it sucks to lose work with what you do in sound design.