a lost file

[lynndavidnewton]

My System is a Mac running Monterey, macOS 12.6.2.
Finale is version 27.3.0.160.
This is the only post I've made here where this data may remotely be relevant.

I lost a piece of work today. I don't actually expect to find it or to even find someone here who has an explanation. I just need to vent, but if you have any clue, please respond.

I was working on a little piece for solo electric guitar and decided to switch the notation from 4/4, quarter = 116 with a relaxed swing feel to 3/4, dotted half = 116. Not terribly difficult but tedious. I spent about an hour on it last night and maybe two hours this morning. I even printed it to a PDF file and then sent it to the printer and I left the computer after terminating Finale (which I don't normally do if I've been using it a lot).

When I came back later, all I can find in my work directory or anywhere else is progressive iterations of the old version.

This may not seem like a major tragedy, but to me it's a mystery. I'm a fanatical backup keeper, and the save command is like a tic in my hands in whatever software I happen to be working with. It's almost like breathing: type in a few characters or make a couple of changes, and press the Save key combination while thinking about what to do next. I was a software engineer for 25 years, and it's been MANY YEARS since I have lost a computer file, and only then due to some act of sheer stupidity.

It's inconceivable to me that I might have worked on something for hours and never thought to save it. The possibility that I might have done that is close to zero. Besides, I was able to print it. (I don't know if Finale prints whatever is in the current work buffers or the last version saved, if there is a difference.)

As I recall, I started the new version but by running the Wizard.

I've looked through my home directory archive for traces of this and can't find a thing. I do put my main work in a place outside of ~/Documents, but that's all been set up in Preferences or wherever that's done. And I looked in ~/Documents, too.

The good news is at least I do have a very tidy printout of the PDF I made this morning, the complete converted version (so I know I'm not imagining something). So all I have to do is re-enter it exactly as it is, no conversion of notation is necessary. But I'm beside myself with dismay that it's just disappeared like that. I don't even know what name to search for in my Time Machine backup. (I've never had to recover a file from Time Machine. I just don't lose them.)

[John Ruggero]

I am running OS 12.6 also. I've had a file not show where it was supposed to be according to a Spotlight search or not actually be in a mail folder that it says it's in a Mail search. But they always turn up eventually and mysteriously. I hope yours does too. Very sorry about that.

[AnneMillington]

Can you search globally for .musx file, and see if anything relevant shows up?
That is all just very bizarre!

[lynndavidnewton]

Thank you Anne Millington! That suggestion reminded me that there might be another possibility, and sure enough, I found the file.

OK, I think I know what happened. Normally I'll start a new file from the Wizard or by some other simple means, e.g. butchering a copy of a previous file.

This time I tried something new, namely trying to use a template. Well and good, except that when I did that, it saved the file in the same directory as other Templates, namely "$HOME/Library/Application Support/MakeMusic/Finale 27/Templates/Guitar Templates" as though I want what I'm working on to become a template, too. That doesn't make sense to me.

And there's where it was. $HOME/Library is, of course, that system directory with about 8 trillion files in it that you don't dare mess with unless you want to spend a season in a really hot place.

I immediately made a copy of it and put it where it belongs.

I must've spent at least an hour and a half looking for that thing. But I'm greatly relieved I don't have to redo work.

Problem is resolved. No further comments or sympathy required! Thanks so much.

[John Ruggero]

Glad you found it.

The first time it saved a file in Templates by default, it didn't make sense to me either. The templates folder would be the least likely place you would want to save a new file. Better it should save to the desktop by default. My wife, an experienced programmer, thinks some sort of alert is in order.

A Spotlight search is the best way to turn up a missing file. You can click on it in the list and make it open from there, but its actual location is not shown, so you can't find find it in a folder and put it where you want to. You have to highlight the file in the Spotlight list and press the Command key. Then the file path shows at the bottom of the window in a tiny little font and often incomplete if it is a long path. Spotlight does all kinds of great things except the one you really want it to do. What were they thinking...its like they think someone is going to freak out if they see a file path so they hide it.

[lynndavidnewton]

Thanks John Ruggero for your comments.

On the topic of searching for files, Spotlight is good, but I rarely use it. As someone who has been a Unix/Linux guy since the middle 1980s, I still use the command line for most fundamental file management, not the GUI. It was the Unix underpinning of Mac's OS X (now macOS) that attracted me to the Macs in the first place.

At least 25 years ago I wrote myself a handy little script with options to it called mkinv (for "make inventory"). What it does (by default) is to use the find(1) utility (/usr/bin/find) to descend the current directory hierarchy looking for files (only, not directories) and it puts the output in a file called INV. The various work directories I have in my home directory tree are full of files named INV. They need to be refreshed as things change, but I'm used to that. And I have an INV in my home directory that's updated daily by a cron(1) script that contains everything im $HOME, including all half-million-plus files in my ~/Library. The reason for using these is that the grep(1) utility is much faster than either find or Spotlight in finding a file and can be tailored with regular expressions.

It was Anne's comment earlier that reminded me that I should check my INV files, whereupon I discovered I'd never looked in ~/Library. This directory hierarchy, I've learned from hard experience, should just be left alone. Don't ever touch it or try to mess with anything in it "by hand" (meaning with Unix commands).

At least I'm glad to confirm that I wasn't being a complete dunderhead when I couldn't find my Finale file. It never even occurred to me that it would be in ~/Library because IMO that's *not* a proper place to save work files.

Yes, the OS probably let me know where I was saving it when I first did it, but I have a tendency to not look closely at the folder name it's being saved in since I'm used to it being saved in the right place. My bad. At least it does let you know, and a heads-up user should know where things belong and take the action necessary to change it if it's not where he or she expects.

[John Ruggero]

I just tried a Spotlight search to see how long it would take to find a file in the templates folder. You're right. It's not great at that. In fact, neither Spotlight nor a Finder Search will find any files in the Finale templates folder.

I tried modifying the search criteria in the Finder search (which at least shows the complete file path for files) with no success. This is ridiculous. I see exactly why you have your own search tool. So now I am looking for an app that does a real search. All the garbage that Spotlight brings up and it can't even find all the actual files.

So the utter stupidity of Finale saving a file to the templates file is revealed. Not only is it the least appropriate place to save it, but once saved there, it is impossible to find with Spotlight or a Finder Search. Great programming, MakeMusic...(strong sarcasm, rant, rant, rant)

[lynndavidnewton]

Yeah, well I won't rant against Finale because I've been using it for years. I'd love to try some of the other programs but at this stage of life I'm happy with what I've got. It is what it is. It's our job as users to figure out how it works.

I highly recommend learning to use a number of basic Unix command line tools. The ones I recommend are ls, cp, rm, pwd, cd (the last two are shell internals), along with maybe find and grep. Those tools will get you a long way in doing file management. It doesn't take too long to get the basic idea behind the grammar of the shell.

FWIW, I used to teach Unix/Linux in a university. (Between real jobs.)

[mknoll]

When I'm not sure where a file has been saved to my first action is to try "Open Recent" and can usually find it that way. Did you try that?

[motet]

I believe the Macintosh has a way to open a UNIX shell window. From there, you can use the UNIX "find" command to find files by name, partial name, modification date, etc.

[John Ruggero]

No command line for me. No way. Way too scary.

Yes, "Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die." (from "The Charge of the Finale Users")

Dorico is enticing, but there dangers also lurk. For example, Dorico users have been asking for quite a while for the ability hide cautionary time signatures, but without success; in fact, resistance. Imagine trying to easily make a set of short exercises without being able to do that.

[lynndavidnewton]

mknoll, I know about and often use Open Recent, but no, I didn't think to try that. That might have worked too.

John Ruggero, the command line is not scary. I used computers from a command line for at least ten years before I ever saw an actual graphic interface. It was the only way. That includes when I first sat down in front of a real computer, an IBM PC with *2* floppy drives and 128K or RAM (state of the art — the owner was a systems engineer for IBM, and it was his personal machine). In those days you had to use DOS commands. This was before MS-DOS (Microsoft DOS) because Microsoft was still in its larval stage.

Think of a command from a command line like this:

The first "word" is a command (an imperative verb) everything else is modifiers that tell it how to operate.

It's both simpler and faster than the GUI for most things.

Yes, motet, the Terminal app opens a shell window from which any commands may be run.
Older computers were like having nothing but a Terminal window.

I use the Emacs text editor (and have since 1987), which has been described as a thermonuclear editing system. I'm able to run shells inside Emacs, which has certain advantages in being able to save and edit output and in jumping from one thing to another.

There are obviously some things we need to do for which the graphical interface is useful, and that certainly applies to most application software such as Finale.

I'm not trying to preach some alternate way of doing things here. Do what works for you. As I do for myself. The truth is, I don't really know that much about the subtle functions of Macs and sometimes have to ask people about stuff that's obvious. Losing track of this file is an obvious example.

I think we've beat this thread to death sufficiently, right?

[AnneMillington]

I kind of like command line, because I started in Unix but was forced into Windows when I changed state agencies. It always seems more "real" to me.

A few observations:
1) I always thought of Windows searches as being pretty good because you could customize to find a document by some text it contained, or by date, or using wildcards, etc. but as the versions moved on, those customizations were hidden and became more trouble to configure. So I purchased Total Commander, which to me is a much more useful app than Windows Explorer.
2) Open Recent didn't work for me in a recent panic search, because I was convinced I was looking for a Word document, when actually what I had lost was in Excel. Hard to overcome the human factor!
3) I read an article that pointed out that most people who came of age with smart phones and social media don't care a whit or even know about directories, hierarchies, paths, etc. The world is flat or maybe a level or two for them. So a lot of applications don't deem it important to show you a file path, because they will find it for you. I totally see that.

Anyway interesting discussion, and so glad you found your file, ldn!