Suddenly project empty

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.
 

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
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?

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!

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

scook
Files with a .tmp extension are not normally persistent in a project folder. This suggest to me that a file save aborted. This would explain the truncated project file and the existence of a temporary 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
 
 

You are probably right....Sonar has been crashing when closing the application lately...and I often save as I close when it prompts. Probably should avoid that from now!
Thanks for the advice regarding assets.

brundlefly
 I have a hard time imagining that a failed save could produce a project file that opens fine but is missing every bit of user content. I think there must be more to it than that.
 
in any case, another strategy for avoiding problems like this is to save each working session as a new version with the a version number or some note about what you did in the session in the file name. This also avoids saving changes you didn't intend and allows reverting to an earlier version to try a different approach to something. If you had backed up that bad project with the name unchanged, you'd be out of luck.

Unless Sonar simply opens an empty trackview/project by default when something goes wrong (like a landing page)....but that's just guessing.