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 also have had experience with certain older DXis where if you have "Zero Controllers" and "Patch/Controller Searchback" enabled it will reset the synth and wipe out any edits or tweaks you've done to the presets. Used to happen all the time with the old Pro 53 synth....also from Native Instruments. But fixable by disabling those options.
 
 

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!).

Fortunately, I had the computer disasters that made me understand the importance of saving before Sonar existed. When Sonar came along, I had already been "trained" by my computers to save often.
 
However, there is a larger issue here. If this IS a bug, there is very little information to go on. I tried to reproduce the issue based on what I thought the OP said, but then later on he mentioned that the material had been frozen two months ago. That could be significant. I'm sure various Windows updates have happened since then, but the Sonar X3e update is less than two months old. Although you should be able to load older projects, freezing may be a special case if the synths keep their data in RAM unless explicitly saved. I don't know, and without more information to go on it's impossible to try and find out if there is a repeatable bug lurking in the freeze process.

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.
 

...wicked
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. 

It shouldn't be that baffling. SONAR is a DAW, not a database management program. While its completely possible for us to do what you suggest, writing utilities to salvage data from a project file, there are at least a hundred other higher priority features that are ahead of that in our todo list. We a small team and finite resources. Writing software takes time so its inevitable that we have to prioritize what we do. AFIK no other DAW provides features that pull arbitrary data from a project file. I might write something like that in my spare time :)

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. 
 

Go spare time!
 
Who was that chap who was doing SONARPlus or whatever the heck that was called? Maybe they can whip something up.
 
And yes, as I said on the other thread, I totally understand it's low priority in the grander scheme of things. I would just add (like I did in the other thread), that you've got marketing gold on your hands if you can advertise better disaster recovery tools. I already spend way too much time doing file/project mgmt. If I saw a DAW that showed me a toolset that solved all that so I could spend more time composing I would most definitely take a peek at it.
 

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?
 

I have stopped using the freeze function in favor of bouncing to another track and then just turning off the synth.
 
I did this because I had 32 bit bridged synths that would not freeze properly. I no longer use most of those synths or have upgraded to the 64 bit versions. However I still prefer bouncing to track.
 
I agree with all those who mentioned backing up. I use an external drive and sync the files whenever I have done something I don't want to loose. I also use the save as before moving from say different recording and mixing and mastering stages.
 
Sorry that you have lost work I hope you can find the audio files from the previous freeze in the audio folder. If not you may be able to recover the files using a 3rd party data recovery undelete program/utility.