Saving something by an existing name on accident

[Curiosity Man]

I had a previous project with a TON of progress on it called Galactic Oversight Song 4, and then I have this other NEWER project I've been working on called Noodles (an entirely different song).

When I wanted to manually save my Noodles project, I had did what I always do and used Save As, except without realizing it I had actually set it to save as on the name "Galactic Oversight Song 4" and NOT "Noodles." I didn't realize I had made this mistake until AFTER already clicking "Yes" when it asks "Do you want to replace it?"

I'm asking because I want to know, in the event of this ever happening (if it's happened to ANYONE that is), is there ANY WAY to recover a PREVIOUS save of a project with the exact same name AT ALL or am I screwed and have I now essentially lost ALL progress I made on "Galactic Oversight Song 4" ??? I want to know REALLY badly if it's possible so I don't end up having to recreate it ALL OVER again from Scratch.

I made this new topic because apparently this topic doesn't seem to exist.

I repeat, can an OLDER save for a project of the SAME name be recovered in ANY way, shape, or form?

[Monospace]

In the same place where you have the project file for Galactic oversight, see if you have a "Galactic Oversight Song 4.mmpz.bak" (or "Galactic Oversight Song 4.mmp.bak", depending on original filetype) file. Open it, and pray to god it works. Then, re-save it with a NEW NAME.
LMMS tends to save backup files (.bak) upon each save, so if you saved the new file only once the old one should work. But if you saved the Noodles file multiple times it may not work. This is because it saves only one .bak file.
If it doesn't work nothing can be done. Galactic oversights like this can lost a lot of progress.

Also, for the future, I recommend making multiple saves of each song. I have "BadFuture1," "BadFuture2," etc all the way to 8 or so. Make one for each major change. This way, in case of an oversight, file corruption, accidental change you can't pinpoint, or if .bak file also isn't working, or even if you want to record progress with milestones, you have a set of useful fallbacks.

Hope this fixes your problem. Please do get back to us. All the best with your project

[musikbear]

I had a previous project with a TON of progress on it called Galactic Oversight Song 4, and then I have this other NEWER project I've been working on called Noodles (an entirely different song).

When I wanted to manually save my Noodles project, I had did what I always do and used Save As, except without realizing it I had actually set it to save as on the name "Galactic Oversight Song 4" and NOT "Noodles." I didn't realize I had made this mistake until AFTER already clicking "Yes" when it asks "Do you want to replace it?"

I'm asking because I want to know, in the event of this ever happening (if it's happened to ANYONE that is), is there ANY WAY to recover a PREVIOUS save of a project with the exact same name AT ALL or am I screwed and have I now essentially lost ALL progress I made on "Galactic Oversight Song 4" ??? I want to know REALLY badly if it's possible so I don't end up having to recreate it ALL OVER again from Scratch.

I made this new topic because apparently this topic doesn't seem to exist.

I repeat, can an OLDER save for a project of the SAME name be recovered in ANY way, shape, or form?

Really a sad situation!
I dearly hope Monospace' tips helps you!
And yes making versions is the best way to make sure it is possible to revert to an earlier file.
In the file menu you find that LMMS has a special method for versions: Save-as-new-version
Even though i doubt there will be anything, you should look in the folder where you have your lmms.exe
In that folder there may be a file with the name recover.mmp/mmpz
I doubt it, but if there is one, rename it imediately! -And before you have attempted to open LMMS again!!
If the file exists, there are a very low chance that it would be your project-file, but much more likely, it will be Noodles, Im sorry, but that is how things are, after an accidental manual overwriting of a file.

Besides that, since you are new in Forum
Welcome Curiosity Man!
Here are all important links:
http://lmms.io/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4740
-A few rules and useful forum instructions
If you like to introduce yourself, to the community, go here:
http://lmms.io/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4480

[Mampfwurm]

That's brutal. I've come close to these kind of experiences in the past, which is why I started saving and backing up my files regularly - I hit Ctrl + S way too often probably. Admittedly, that doesn't really help you in your predicament. If the LMMS-based tricks don't play out, one could always try playing around with the harddrive. Data that is deleted isn't suddenly gone, it's merely marked as deleted, no longer read and will eventually be overwritten whenever that space is allocated to something. There are tools like testdisk that can, among other things, recover such data. But that would really only be a last resort, as it will recover tons of stuff with garbled file names, and half of it will be completely broken anyways. Since you've probably continued using your computer (and as a result, your harddrive) since then, there is a high likeliness the data might already be overwritten.

Maybe such scenarios could also be avoided by LMMS making automatically making a seperate *.bak file when any file is overwritten? There are solutions like adding a number in brackets (like "(1)") to avoid conflicting file names. I'm not a great programmer but I imagine this wouldn't be hard to do.

[Monospace]

Wouldn't recommend playing around with harddrive.

[Mampfwurm]

Wouldn't recommend playing around with harddrive.

Yeah, it's certainly not something for a first attempt and kind of depends on how comfortable one feels with this kind of stuff. I've had some successful recoveries with the mentioned method in the past, but it's easy make everything way worse if one doesn't fully know what they're doing. I should keep in mind not everyone is as unreasonably fearless when it comes to playing around with technology.