I am pissed. I am beyond pissed. I need to vent for a second. Don't mind me.

I've been working on a new album for about six months. Today I was working with one of the songs in Sonar (X1 / 64bit) when the dreaded "Cannot save file - disk may be full" message popped up. I'm sure you've already guessed that my disks were NOT full. Alas...

Luckily, it had only been a few minutes since I had last saved, but I was excited about some of the stuff I had done in those minutes, so I wanted to see if I could avoid a total loss of that information.

I tried saving a few more times, but that didn't work. So, I tried saving it to another drive. That didn't work either.

Eventually I gave up and shut down Sonar, losing a few minutes of work (as far as I knew.)

But, when I loaded Sonar back up and clicked on the file...

"Could not open this project because the file has been truncated. This can happen if the application closed unexpectedly while saving the file."

There's still hope, though! Safe mode! I opened it in safe mode...

Empty project. No tracks. Nothing. Gone.

The audio all seems to still be in the audio folder, but a vast majority of the project was still MIDI data.

I want to hit something. I feel like I'm in shock. I've been staring at the blank project for 10 minutes. The whole damn thing is gone.

F*ck you, Sonar.

Sorry to hear that but with six months of work I'd have about 6 tons of backup media.

Relax, breathe, enable auto-save ... if the tunes are good they're still in your head

Auto-save is how I noticed the error, FreeFlyBertl!

I just checked my backups, and there's stuff there from about a week ago, but unfortunately this song changed pretty drastically in that week - vocals were recorded, arrangement was completely overhauled, pianos were tracked, etc. So, I'm revising my title to "cost me one really productive week of work."

I'm not prone to over-reactions, so I'll move on and probably forget about all of this by tomorrow...but damn, it's frustrating!

I've had this exact scenario happen twice recently with X2A.  If I remember right the autosave triggered the error. 

I couldn't save to anywhere, USB media included.

When I quit SONAR and tried to open the file all the changes were gone from the project file and the autosave file was "truncated". 

I didn't lose a lot of work, but still.....


John

In the future, I think the best way to deal with that problem is to create a new project while the corrupt project is still open (make sure allow multiple open projects is configured in Preferences), then copy and paste whatever you can to the new project and save it. I'm assuming that would work, although I've never had the "disk full" error.

It would be really great to understand how this problem comes about.  Obviously the disk isn't full. 

If it was really some sort of write error why can't we save the file to other disks or USB media?  Can't it recover more gracefully?

This has been an occasional problem for years now, it would be great if CW could take some time to see what the possible causes are. 

StepD


In the future, I think the best way to deal with that problem is to create a new project while the corrupt project is still open (make sure allow multiple open projects is configured in Preferences), then copy and paste whatever you can to the new project and save it. I'm assuming that would work, although I've never had the "disk full" error.

Great idea!  I will definitely try it next time it happens.
 
Thanks,
 
John

I think it's a Windows temp file problem. It can happen in Word and other Windows programs too.

StepD


I think it's a Windows temp file problem. It can happen in Word and other Windows programs too.

I guess it could be, but I haven't seen anything like this outside of SONAR in Windows 7.  Win 7 seems pretty solid as far as data retention goes.
 
John

1) It's worth backing up your work to a DVD or other potable storage at least once a day. I do it last thing before I go to bed

2) It's inexcusable that software even has the capability to screw up a project file to that extent. Truncated? So what? That doesn't mean "deleted." The Sonar team know the insides and outsides of these project files, and therefore they should know enough to write code to salvage a file that has been truncated. Every app should have a utility to repair files that have been corrupted in some way. I had a similar experience in Pro Tools with a file randomly becoming corrupted and apparently unsalvageable. I was just as p!ssed. Come on Cakewalk, people put their hearts and souls into these project files.