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.

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 :(
 

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. That aside, I'm not quite following you here......are you saying that because you did an unfreeze on a synth in a project that it also affected your back up .cwp file of the same project ?
 
Once you realised something was wrong, I'm assuming that you tried the undo function or backing out of the project without saving ?

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.

What I see here is a simple case of using a flawed method of saving your work. If anything Calkwalk is at fault for offering the auto save function which 90% of us know is not reliable and we use "save as" instead. Sorry you trusted the auto save. 

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
 
 

kb420
What's the point of freezing a track if you can't safely unfreeze it at a later time?

The main point of freezing a track is to render the audio so the synth is not needed. If you open that project on another machine where that synth doesn't exist or years later when you've moved to an operating system and/or version of SONAR in which that synth is no longer supported (e.g. a 32-bit DX plugin in x64 SONAR), you'll be out of luck, but the project will still play correctly using the rendered audio. Using it to conserve CPU temporarily is another use, but you have to understand that the synth and patches are being unloaded which is going to cause trouble if you haven't saved modifications to a patch.
 
My guess would be that Unfreeze is programmed to restore the last saved version of the patch from disk which is the only logical way to do it since the space in RAM where the patch parameters were being temporarily stored won't be there if the project is saved and reopened later. Saving patches in progress as new presets is as important as saving projects.

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.

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.

 
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.

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

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.

 
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.

No they are hard won wisdom. You can ignore the collective advice of this all you want but it is neither arrogant or combative. It is a very good way to work with software. 
 
The posts above go into detail why it has to be done this way. Saving projects is normal workflow and saving patches is important if you ever want to recall them. All this was covered in the first reply. Others have echoed the very same procedures.
 
That does not imply that I don't feel for the OP for the situation he finds himself in. We wouldn't bother answering if we didn't care. But in order to forgo this ever happening again it would serve him and all others to follow these procedures.