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Finale cannot open the selected filetype

Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2018 9:17 pm
by allenblake21
Hi -
I have been working on a piece in FINALE 2012 on a mac, and I personally save it almost every 10 seconds. Then my Finale quit, and there are no BAK's of this on the computer, and it is now saying "Finale cannot open the selected filetype." There are no TEMP files of it either. It seems to have completely gone batty.

I also have tried to do file>open, copied the file and changed it to .xml, .musx, and even prayed I could convert it somehow to .pdf so I would at least have a hard copy of the work. Can anyone help? Or even open it for me?

Thanks.

Re: Finale cannot open the selected filetype

Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2018 9:27 pm
by motet
You didn't have Autosave turned on?

Re: Finale cannot open the selected filetype

Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2018 9:29 pm
by allenblake21
Just checked in preferences, and the box is un-checked.

Re: Finale cannot open the selected filetype

Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2018 9:31 pm
by motet
Oh, too bad. Looks like portions of the file have been zeroed. I'm afraid you're probably out of luck--I'm sorry.

Re: Finale cannot open the selected filetype

Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2018 9:33 pm
by allenblake21
motet wrote:Oh, too bad. Looks like portions of the file have been zeroed. I'm afraid you're probably out of luck--I'm sorry.
I hadn't finished. Are any of the portions not zeroed? Is there anything left in the file that I could get? Or is the whole thing zeroed?

Re: Finale cannot open the selected filetype

Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2018 9:56 pm
by motet
The whole thing isn't zeroed, but much of it is, and I'd say there's little hope of salvaging anything. It's binary data rather than anything recognizable.

Are you sure there's not a .bak file somewhere? Can you do a search?

Re: Finale cannot open the selected filetype

Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2018 10:00 pm
by allenblake21
I searched for .bak, bak, by the file name, everything. Hmm. Thanks for trying - for future reference, how do you think this happened?

Re: Finale cannot open the selected filetype

Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2018 10:05 pm
by zuill
If you have no backup files, that is because you didn't design a path to a folder in which to have Finale place them. I would do that, as well as turn on Autosave. One more word of advice: Save different versions of a project so that you have more than one file. I often save a new version of a file when I go to the next level of the project.

Also, if Mac has the same problem Windows has, create a folder for the temp files (temporary files that only Finale can use for a single session) that is unique to Finale. When Finale is closed, delete these files. They are no longer needed. No future session of Finale can use them. They can cause file corruption.

Zuill

Re: Finale cannot open the selected filetype

Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2018 11:56 pm
by motet
I don't know from the Mac, but won't the "Time Machine" help here?

Re: Finale cannot open the selected filetype

Posted: Wed Jun 27, 2018 1:14 am
by MikeHalloran
motet wrote:I don't know from the Mac, but won't the "Time Machine" help here?
If the file has been saved successfully and indexing is tuned on (default) for Time Machine, yes.