I've been working on a big orchestral project for three weeks, up through last night. The last thing I did was export it so I could listen to it later on my ipod. This morning, every MIDI track is empty. It was entirely MIDI at this stage, so the whole thing's just a blank project now.
 
The only explanation I can think of is that after selecting all tracks for the export I must have then accidentally hit the Del key without noticing and then saved the project without looking at the screen. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
 
Don't you have a backup, you ask? Well of course I do! I am, after all, a Computer Professional. Unfortunately, it's a copy of the same damn empty file.
 
Oh well, better get (re)started...I've still got a couple weeks to go before the memorial service.
 

That sucks Dave. If it's any consolation, your second version is bound to be better.....and at least you have the export to work from. 
 
A similar thing happened to me some time ago. Saved a project, opened it up the next day and the whole thing was blank. Luckily I had a history of Gobbler revisions to fall back on...

Oh man that is the pitts.
 
Hope you get recovered soon.

Ouchity... that is certainly some supreme suckage. I have to ask though out of my own paranoia and substantially less professional capacity in regards to computators... how did the MIDI data on the backups get deleted as well?
 
I ask because I am highly neurotic about employing "Save As" throughout my projects which in my feeble mind would mean even if I did something catastrophic in one of my "adventurous" moods or perhaps in a drunken stupor that I could revert back to an older version and all would be well (just missing any new data) and if I copied a project (with all associated files) to a backup device I would expect it to open exactly as it was saved.
 
So when you say you've done backups of the project how could the MIDI files get wiped on those backups? Were the MIDI files not saved along with the backup (and merely relying on a local "pool")? When opening the backup project did it somehow try to sync with the current project and wipe out the MIDI data? Perhaps there is a setting in Preferences somewhere preventing the files from the backup to load?
 
You are far more learned than I am so I am assuming you have searched for the raw MIDI files in the appropriate places but if not maybe they are still lurking about somewhere. Whatever happened I'd be curious as to any possible answers why you lost your data if you do end up figuring it out. Maybe a call to support or flagging one of the Bakers via PM is in order. This also seems like the type of thing scook might be able to help with (clever fellow that he is).
 
Anyway, that blows but if you get it sorted out I'd certainly be interested in any solutions. If it can happen to you I can only imagine someone like me is far more vulnerable to disappearing data. Yikes!
 
Good luck.

Perhaps there should be kind of a failsafe mechanism in Sonar when Sonar notices that a huge amount of data is being wiped out. It could ask are "you sure" when deleting big amounts of midi data or audio.

Man, I'm sorry Dave.

The cool thing is that you are able to focus to have made it that far and you have the
talent/ability to handle it again. That's tuff enough brother. Stay cool Dave.
 
 

kakku
Perhaps there should be kind of a failsafe mechanism in Sonar when Sonar notices that a huge amount of data is being wiped out. It could ask are "you sure" when deleting big amounts of midi data or audio.

I've been away from my DAW and Sonar for so long I've been forgetting things but this shook some stuff loose.
 
IIRC a Ctrl + A + Del action should NOT delete MIDI clips due to the non-destructive editing component of Sonar. I'm not sure but even if you performed this action on all versions of the project the clips may still be stored somewhere.
 
However, and again I am not sure of this because it has been a while, there is a setting in Preferences for "Non-Destructive MIDI Editing" (or something like that) that is checked by default (meaning you are by default using the non-destructive mode). If that is unchecked then the delete action will wiped out MIDI clips/data from the drive(s).
 
Still though I think a Ctrl + A + Del command would delete the actual clips in a project. Not just clear the notes out of the clips... so if the clips are there but the notes are gone that's pretty weird.
 
So basically what I'm saying is I have no freaking clue and this post is probably less than useless... lulz.
 
It made sense before I started typing it though so perhaps it'll lead bit to some possible solutions.

I forgot to mention that I use the auto save function which saves every 7 minutes.

I don't because I'm pretty vigilant about saving manually. If I did though I'd probably set auto save to engage using the "after X amount of edits" instead of the time interval option. I am a wanderer so instead of it diligently saving away when I'm likely in the other room doing something dumb for a couple hours it would just save based on activity.
 
IIRC the auto save only keeps a certain number of saves before old ones roll off so if I set it to a time range and did my old wandering routine I'd just have a pile of saves where nothing happened.
 
I may be wrong on that.