Tough lesson in saving

[Electropocalypse]

I was having some an annoying issue after saving a project (put 2 hours of mastering into it).
I'm running LMMS 1.2.2 on Windows 11 with a 2.6 Ghz processor.

I hit Ctr+S (save) followed by Alt+F4 (close) and I think I did it too quickly (i.e the project didn't fully save in time) because LMMS froze and I had to close it from task manager.

I tried reopening the project again and it freezes at 89%.

I then ran the bak file of that project and same thing, freezes at 89%.


Finally, I tried 'restore previous versions' on the LMMS projects folder and I successfully recovered the project (from the day before).


My advice to others... Make sure you save, wait 3 or 5 seconds and then close. Also, hit Ctr+S throughout your progress. If you spent hours on something without saving and LMMS crashes you could lose all your work (though I love that LMMS creates an temporary backup file when this happens).


I guess this leaves me with the question - is there a way to recover a corrupted save? Thanks guys.

[Monospace]

No, the best thing you have is recover.mmp bak file- it IS the way to recover corrupted saves, but the thing is, if there was a way to recover corrupted save wouldn't it be the default save by itself? (:
LMMS creates a temporary backup file ALL the time, not only "when this happens". How does LMMS know when you'll crash? It doesn't know. So it creates a backup file regularly.
The best you can do, is go to settings, enable "Allow auto-save while playing" and reduce the time gap of your autosave. This also means that sometimes there is no version of a file without an irreversible mistake you made a few minutes ago, though, so be careful.
Me, I carefully version each time I make major noticeable differences because you never know...

Perhaps a bit too many.


In any case, versioning control be thy friend.

[musikbear]

Me, I carefully version each time I make major noticeable differences

🙏😍

But when is it safe to shut down?
You get a message!
Look in left low of the screen.
Every time you make a manual save, you get a respond from LMMS and it is very important to look at that every time you save!
It will either say something like: Project zxcv saved successfully
OR
Project zxcv was not saved saved! There was an error
If you see the error warning, you should use save-as and save the project to an other folder with a new name.
For all that likes suspenders and belt, take a look at the saved project on disk, and make an estimate on weather the files size seams to be sane for a project of that complexity.
Failed saves are only a few KB in size.
I have tried to make the save messages in different colors, but Qt -our "beloved" UI layer would not play ball 🙄
Also -Do as Monospace says: Use version control!

[Monospace]

Even with careful version, sometimes the minor changes are worth a lot to you and I've lost them before... [: that would be a lot of bad luck.

[Veggie Savage]

Damn, I've a Similar Situation Happen today.
I was working on a Project, Hit the Save Button cuz I had to leave. After it Saved Exited out of LMMS then Hit the Physical Power Button on my Computer.

Came back tried to load up the previous file I saved. It said " The File <File Name> seems to contain errors and therefore could not be loaded ".

I clicked on the back up like a normal do except nothing happen no matter how many times I click. Checked the Properties of the file and it said it contained 0 bytes.

Does this mean there is literally nothing I can do to Save It? Is there a way to modify the file? I tried using testdisk but got confused.

Maybe it has to do with this particularly broken file not having recycling icon unlike the rest of my functioning backup files that do.

[Monospace]

Damn, I've a Similar Situation Happen today.
I was working on a Project, Hit the Save Button cuz I had to leave. After it Saved Exited out of LMMS then Hit the Physical Power Button on my Computer.

Came back tried to load up the previous file I saved. It said " The File <File Name> seems to contain errors and therefore could not be loaded ".

I clicked on the back up like a normal do except nothing happen no matter how many times I click. Checked the Properties of the file and it said it contained 0 bytes.

Does this mean there is literally nothing I can do to Save It? Is there a way to modify the file? I tried using testdisk but got confused.

Maybe it has to do with this particularly broken file not having recycling icon unlike the rest of my functioning backup files that do.

I got the similar issue a while back. Not sure what exactly happened. I had to use the recover.mmp backup file from users>Documents>lmms. It didn't have all my modifications saved, but it had to do.
Can't pinpoint reason. Seemingly random but unlikely.

[brandystarbrite]

Something like that happened to me years ago. When I used the back up file, all of the newer changes weren't saved, but at least the original changes in the project, were still there.