Ugh. Really?

Great tip Jeff. 

The only time I ever had any success with saying 'Yes' was way back in version 6.2.1

I think something got broke after that. But like you, I now always say NO and accept that I have to go back a bit.

Hi Folks, 

Since I've been hanging around a bit today, I'd like to share something I often share with others. 

I hate dealing with losing any type of data (be it with SONAR or any other program) so I'm personally pretty meticulous about backing up my data and using versioning features when available. Below is something I like to share with everyone just in case you ever are dealing with a project or file that is corrupted:

For starters, always keep a backup of your project on a different hard drive. If your hard drive fails, you will want to be able to recover your files from a second internal hard drive or from an external hard drive. Even if your hard drive is a high performance, high quality and very expensive hard drive, do not make the mistake of trusting that it will never fail. It might, and if it does you will regret not having a backup.

Secondly, I STRONGLY suggest taking advantage of SONAR's auto-save and versioning features found under Edit > Preferences > File - Advanced. I cannot recommend keeping versions of files enough, for any application. With applications that do not do this automatically, I manually create versions after every so many revisions. For example, I keep an Excel spreadsheet with a lot of data that I have lost in the past due to file corruption. Now, with my Excel spreadsheet, I create a new version every two weeks and add the time and/or date to the end of the file. For example:

My Finances 7_21_2011.xlsx
My Finances 8_14_2011.xlsx

SONAR's versioning feature will handle this for you. Essentially this keeps versions of your project file so that should your latest project become corrupted, you can revert back to the previous version. You might still lose a little bit of work, but it is better to lose 10 mins or an hour of work opposed to the entire project. Ultimately you'll want to decide on the number of versions you would like to keep. If you choose "10" for example, it will only maintain the 10 most recent revisions. It will automatically name the files with the timestamp of previous versions. For example:

My project.cwp (this is your most recent project that will be referenced by SONAR and will open to your most recent changes)
My project.cwp.~2011-10-03-12-17-49-385 (this is a project that was saved on 10/3/2011 at 12:17 PM)
My project.cwp.~2011-10-02-12-10-39-373 (this is a project that was saved on 10/2/2011 at 12:10 PM)

If I ever needed to revert back to the previous project, I can just remove the "~2011-10-03-12-17-49-385" of my first revision. This can also be done from File > Revert. The nice part about this is that the project files themselves are small, so it is not like it is creating a version of all the audio files and taking up lots of hard drive space. The space taken up is minimal.

I hope this helps!

If all the files have been deleted, they will have been removed from the master file table, not actually deleted from your hard drive. Don't use the harddrive at all, download some free recovery software, and have a look. The files should still (unless something has been written over them) be on the drive.

I don't see why you shouldn't be able to recover some, or all of your files this way.

At the end of the day though, ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR PROJECTS!!!! Hard drive crashes can occur without warning and you never know.