Hello friends:
I am one of those users who don't save as I go and I have never had issues until last night when Sonar Crashed.

I am Running Sonar on Windows Server 2012 R2 64.
Note: Because this is a server, most services are disabled or not installed.
Sonar is installed on a Samsung 850 PRO SSD and a separate 850 holds audio.
I have 64GB RAM with I7 Intel 3. something. :) And Optimized/Over Clocked.

RME UFX Plus with dedicate allegro USB 3.0 PCI Express Card. (All other USB/FW/Network sources disabled).

In a nutshell, the system handles well.

Here is something I think of:
As a Software Programmer, I work with teams designing systems that cannot failed (they can) but that's not something we want to ever have happen or rely on. For example: I cannot program a medical device which reads a person blood pressure or respiration and say, "well things happen, the patient died because the machine crashed in the ER."

Okay, that's an extreme example but you get where I am going, in a nutshell, there are systems that should not fail.

I mentioned the above because, while failure and crashes do happen, you are not going to see this on any Software maker website, it can happen but no one really wants to be known for it, and in many instances, this is very bad for business.

So what do you do if you are recording a band or in the middle of an expensive session and Sonar crashes? How do you prevent this or is this even preventable? Has Sonar ever crashed on you and if so, what were you doing at the time?

Again, the premise of this post is to ask how do you prevent crashes, some of you may not have even experienced it. I didn't, well until it happened. 

I am going to remember to save my work.

Looking forward to learning from your experiences.

AI

In most cases, in my personal accounts anyway, it has been plug ins. a plug in that doesn't play well with sonar.
A few other cases it has been hardware related (one point I was using an outdated audio interface) and then at other points, I believe it has been Sonar itself. Software does strange things sometimes and crashing is one of them.
Ive had crashes in Sonar that are unexplainable and this has lead me to save my work and save it often.
 
I should note though that it has been a long time since I have experienced a crash within sonar.
I built a brand new Intel I7 4790K system last April and its been solid as a rock so far.
 
Cakewalk has been pretty honest IMO. If crashes are their own fault, they say it.
They might give options to try because lets face it, your a software developer you know, each system is different so its near impossible to recognize and pin point every issue when everyone is using a different system.
 
Diagnosis is key. This can be accomplished best by removing the elements.
- Remove all plug ins.
- Start a new project.
- Take note of each crash and if possible take screen shots/save mini dumps.
- Check windows event viewer, not always but sometimes its written right there.

chuckebaby
In most cases, in my personal accounts anyway, it has been plug ins. a plug in that doesn't play well with sonar.
A few other cases it has been hardware related (one point I was using an outdated audio interface) and then at other points, I believe it has been Sonar itself. Software does strange things sometimes and crashing is one of them.
Ive had crashes in Sonar that are unexplainable and this has lead me to save my work and save it often.
 
I should note though that it has been a long time since I have experienced a crash within sonar.
I built a brand new Intel I7 4790K system last April and its been solid as a rock so far.

Interesting, now that you mentioned effects, I just add the Breverb before the crash occurred.


I should add that I have run some serious intensive task in Sonar with success, which is why I took it for granted.

Ive been right where you are now man.
It can be frustrating, it can be trivial and even play mind games with you.
Sometimes its the least thing you expect and sometimes the exact thing you expected.
 
What ever it is, I hope you get it sorted

Countermeasures - I save often, run at a conservative sample rate (24/44.1) because I can't really hear a difference at higher rates and I favor system stability over high sample rates, and the application load on my DAW is very compact, so no MS Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.  I also don't run any email client on the DAW and no web browsers are open when I'm tracking/mixing/editing.  I'm one of those fortunate folks who have never experienced a crash/BSOD on my DAW.  The DAW is 7 years old now but is still more than up to the task (thanks Jim!).  Anyway, these are some of the things I think may help contribute to its stability.

I think I never had an actual crash until just this August. I've had the dropout issue audio engine stopping, but that's not a crash. I'm pretty meticulous about building and setting up my DAW. I even keep it off line. And I don't use half the stuff others around here use, my projects are at most 6 VST's and a few audio tracks and very few plugs. My CPU meters never go past 20 MPH. 
 
So when I started getting crashes the only thing I could think to blame was either Windows updates or Sonars updates had become crap on my system. They seem to have magically gone away for now which is almost worse. 
I'll soon find out as I am just updating everything again tonight. 
I was caught out just once on the first crash so I enabled auto save for now,,, I hate it because it makes a big mess in your project folders. I'm mostly saving after every move.  
 
So even though I personally thought I would never have a crash because I'm so smart and do all the right things.... I had a bunch of them in a row over a few weeks. My question is why would the same system that ran for 3 years without a crash, crash? In the past I would have though Hard drive.. SSD? If I do get another crash I guess I will look at swapping out my C drive. 

Crashes happen. Power fails... so I constantly backup my work to an extra internal drive and periodically back that up to an external drive.

Sonar is very solid for me so crashes happen when I expect for the most part. I still use some 32bit plugins that are the cause of most and they only happen when closing the file. So save before close and no harm done other than some extra clicks to close the alerts.

The only other crash I have had was recently dragging audio to midi expecting Melodyne (essentials -sonar) to convert. I abandoned trying after the same thing happenned repeating the chore...

Yes.. that was involved in mine, all the times it crashed I had a 32 bit plug, mr Tramp running. Thing is I have used that one and only 32 bit plug since time remembered and never had crashes. I'm still using it but slowly trying to make Lounge Lizard sound as good. Mr Tramp is the only Wurly that seems to nail it for me. 

Cactus Music
Yes.. that was involved in mine, all the times it crashed I had a 32 bit plug, mr Tramp running. Thing is I have used that one and only 32 bit plug since time remembered and never had crashes. I'm still using it but slowly trying to make Lounge Lizard sound as good. Mr Tramp is the only Wurly that seems to nail it for me. 

Do you make a habit of saving before you close such projects? I do this and never lose anything.

I have two 32 bit plugins I can't afford to change/lose. I have Will Lee's bass sample library which is in a very old format and only VSampler can load them... and i have an old copy of NI's B4

@catcus - the earlier versions of Mr.Tramp would cause a crash just having it loaded AND having the project loaded for hours (like 6-8 continuous) would invoke the crash due to a memory leak.  It is due to the VST wrapper that was used to produce the plug-in (at least that's what I recall).  Pretty sure it was fixed up in the later paid versions. 
 
Note: the above only applied to the 'free' version of that plug-in and the suite of that plug-ins.
 
I love the Tramp and their B-3 too.
 
On the OT, I don't recall any crashes in Sonar that were not due to a plug-in - though I'm not a heavy hitter either to be fair.  For me, the cake has always been good to me.