I just lost hours of work!

[tdlucas]

All of my work over the last three days is completely gone! I saved every edit, so it's not a matter of saving. When I opened the score just now and made one edit and tried to save it, I got a window that said Finale can't find the file, so I couldn't save it. When I closed the file, it was gone off of my desktop and out of the backup files. What can I do??

[Hector Pascal]

Sorry to hear that.... Perhaps try a spotlight search for the file name, or just part of the file name and see what it comes up with. Maybe there's a copy hiding somewhere. Perhaps there is a way to show any hidden files in the finder windows? Just a thought. I guess most of us have met with similar scenarios at some point.

You have served us all with a welcome reminder to check our backup processes. I have been known to occasionally email myself my file, as a quick safety measure.

Someone else here might have more helpful advice... I wish you lots of luck going forward.

Cheers,
HP.

[zuill]

tdlucas,

Have you read the discussions here about the temp folder? If not, it's time to take that suggestion seriously. If you can't find any of the discussions, come back and I'll describe the process.

Sorry about the loss of your document. Look for the .asv file. If you don't have autosave on, that's another suggestion to follow.

Zuill

[jbearch]

That happened to me recently too. I never figured out why Finale couldn't find the file anymore. Probably something corrupting the file making it invisible. I even contacted support too but they couldn't help with it either. I think Finale (at least the newer versions) can be very unforgiving when one hits a wrong key by accident. Or whatever it is that ticks it off. Of course at that time I didn't have automatic backup turned on either. So I learned my lesson. Really better to have that turned on as I have found.

Jeffrey

[OCTO]

My copyist sends me new files that are created January 1st 1970.

[Peter Thomsen]

Interesting!

I have not heard of that issue for many years.

It could be an issue with a defect “backup battery” = the battery that powers the internal clock, which keeps track of time, day, month, year, when the computer is off.

Twenty years ago I read a notice about Mac computers whose clock always went back to august 27th, 1956 - because of a defect backup battery.
Ray Montagne who wrote software to the CUDA-microcontroller (a chip that controls PRAM and ADB on many Macs), was born august 27th, 1956.

[N Grossingink]

Regarding the lost file:

This happens every so often on Windows, not so much on Mac. Recently on this forum, a Mac user had this same problem. Upon a bit of discussion, it was found that he had the Finale file open for days, without ever putting it away. This might not be the case for you. Files should be closed at the end of a work session and the computer turned off at the end of each day, in my opinion. Backups should be kept on an external drive.

N.

[ebiggs1]

I am not going to be of any help but a brother in circumstance. It has happened to me, very rarely. It was a problem with the temp directory. My best guess anyway. Never mess with it when Finale is open. I did a test to see if I could repeat the problem and it did. Finale is supposed to clean it or clear it out when you close. But it doesn't seem to always do that?
I always use backup and autosave. Finale is more stable now than it has been in the past but old habits are hard to break. So, I save a lot. When I do major edits I always 'save as' a new file.

[zuill]

With the unique temp folder, make sure you have a separate folder for each version of Finale. Also, when Finale is closed, clean it out. I do this quite regularly as this will make sure Finale is not trying to access an older .tmp file. Any .tmp file in the folder is not usable by Finale, as closing the folder renders them not needed. However, I believe that having many of them in the folder is confusing Finale at times, so its best to clean them out. Finale should do that automatically when closing, but the programmers have failed to make this happen. It is a design error which MakeMusic needs to fix. Meanwhile, we help Finale by removing these files.

Zuill

[motet]

My theory is that Finale creates these temp files it needs but doesn't keep them open or otherwise lock them while it's running, and some Windows clean-up process comes along and deletes them when Finale still needs them, with disastrous consequences. This jibes with reports of it being more likely to happen if Finale has been running a long time. Finale needs to keep them open. There's also a way to open a file and mark it for deletion automatically when Finale exits or the file is closed, which would eliminate having stray leftovers to clean up.

[Nick Mazuk]

Personally, I have a couple automatic backups happening to make sure that I don't lose a ton of work. I have one service that automatically backs up to the cloud continuously, another that automatically backups to the cloud every day, and an external hard drive that I backup to each week. It may be overkill, but I've never lost more than 15-20 minutes of work using this system. And if the world/internet burns down, I will still only lose a week of work.

For the future, I would recommend some backup system similar to this. Especially if you are on your computer many hours each day, it really helps to have automatic backups in place so you never have to worry about losing hours of work.

[michelp]

Dropbox. All consecutive versions can be restored.

[tdlucas]

Dropbox. All consecutive versions can be restored.

How do I get Finale to automatically backup to Dropbox?

[zuill]

Backing up files is a good thing. But the first step is to avoid corruption. In the 22 years I've used Finale, I can count on one hand the number of times I needed to revert to a backup file.

Zuill

[michelp]

Dropbox. All consecutive versions can be restored.

How do I get Finale to automatically backup to Dropbox?

Install Dropbox. It creates a folder on your hard disk. The files you place in it are sent to the space you have on their server.
Put the file on which you are working in the Dropbox folder. Each time you save it, it gets uploaded to your server. Every consecutive version can be restored.
Add this to local backups (USB drive, external drive).

[David Ward]

I use Box from https://www.box.com/en-gb/home which does much the same as Dropbox (which I do have as well).

For local backups I have recently found ForeverSave 2 a great boon and extremely easy to set up. It's available for a very modest charge from https://toolforcesoftware.com/ It saves as often as you set it up to for whichever applications you choose, and it keeps as many past versions as you allow.

[gogreen]

When I switched from a Windows environment to Mac, I went with Freefilesync for local backup (https://freefilesync.org.) I have it set on my iMac to back up my files to an external drive and to my networked Macbook Air. For cloud backup I use iDrive.

I set Finale to autosave my work every 5 minutes and to make backups when saving files.

On my iMac, TimeMachine is on, and I also use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable entire backup of my hard disk.

For Windows, I absolutely loved Syncbackfree (https://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/ ... e-hub.html). Not available for Mac.

[MikeHalloran]

When I switched from a Windows environment to Mac, I went with Freefilesync for local backup (https://freefilesync.org.) I have it set on my iMac to back up my files to an external drive and to my networked Macbook Air. For cloud backup I use iDrive.

I set Finale to autosave my work every 5 minutes and to make backups when saving files.

On my iMac, TimeMachine is on, and I also use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable entire backup of my hard disk.

For Windows, I absolutely loved Syncbackfree (https://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/ ... e-hub.html). Not available for Mac.

You’re on High Sierra. If you have no other OS installed and your boot drive is formatted APFS, you can restore your entire system to its state from an hour up to a few days before such a calamity occurs. It takes a few minutes.

http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtop ... =4&t=64689

Windows has nothing like this — yet. There’s no way that Microsoft is ignoring the implications.