Tell them you switched to John Cage's Four Thirty Three!

sharke
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. 
 

Probably true, but it is human nature to think that the lost creation was the best creation. Nothing is ever as good as what we imagined. In 1797 it was a person from Porlock, today it is a computer glitch.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_from_Porlock
 
 
 

I know that feeling - it's as if the floor vanishes from under your feet and your heart sinks...
 
Leaned it the hard way when I first started working with computers. I'd saved all my Cakewalk work files to a couple of 120 Mb floppies.
 
I's tested them, re-opening each project directly from the floppies. I never realized that the wrk files were only pointing to the data on my hard drive, so I erased everything. Months of work - all my projects. Gone.
 
Earlier this year, I realized that probably just like Dave I had accidentally erased all the content of MIDI tracks in project - and I'd been working on those for weeks. My most recent back up dated from a few hours, so all wasn't lost, but I was still losing an entire evening worth of hard work.
 
BUT, I had Time Machine enabled, which updates/creates back ups every hour. Basically, you let it creates one huge back up of your system the first time you run it and then it create hourly revision based on which files you modify. So I went back one hour in time and retrieved my work.
 
I used to disable TM and only enable it every now and then, but ever since that night, I very rarely turn it off and I couldn't imagine myself w/o it or an equivalent.

Good news is that the reconstructed project is coming along nicely, and as sharke optimistically suggested, the new version will indeed be better, I think. The empty project still had all the instruments loaded so I didn't have to search around for the patches again. My elaborate tempo map was intact, as was the guide track and markers.
 
How did the backup get blanked out too? Well, I'd done a backup right after closing out of SONAR, overwriting the previous backup. Talk about your Duh moments.
 
The irony is that until recently this would have never happened. With the old machine, I would not have been able to keep 28 instruments live without freezing most of them. I was enjoying the luxury of my new DAW's 16GB of RAM being able to do load so many instruments simultaneously. Having the entire string section up in the PRV at once is such a joy for composing elaborate arrangements. With great power comes great responsibility, I guess.

So maybe's there's a feature request in all of this.  Cubase keeps the last 10 backups (by default).  I've found that to be a bit annoying, but maybe I appreciate it a whole lot more in light of your experience, Dave.  Maybe SONAR should have the same option available.

Good! I'm glad you're getting it back. I was thinking that delete just changes the extension name so, shouldn't everything still be there but just with a different .ext ? I know just enough to get in trouble though.. I know that a tech "accidentally" wiped a data drive that had about 2 years of my daughters audio work on it. The claimed that they did not wipe it, but they obviously did. The reformatted the both drives instead of just the C drive. A couple of years ago I had another tech guy work on it and he recovered almost everything, if not everything. I was surprised but he got it back. Recuva won't get it back?
 
J

I guess it might be prudent to save projects as MIDI as well. 

Bit, I'm happy to hear that your problems are not a complete loss and that you're making good progress again.