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AE horror strory
Just wanted to share this…
Working on an AE project with several comps (80+), and an average of 60 layers of keyframed animations per comp. All of a sudden, I opened the comp I was working on the day before (14 hours stint), and it was like I had dreamed the prior day’s session. Even the project’s file date was from the day before. It was seriously as if that day’s edit hadn’t happened…and I don’t drink much(yet). I checked with everyone here at the suite to confirm that I had actually been at my desk that day and that they actually remember seeing the AE project on my screen and not Facebook. For a couple of days I’ve been trying to figure out what happened. This morning it struck me. I routinely back up my projects to an external drive. At some point I had begun opening the version of the project on the backup drive and editing it. Then, when my backup routine ran, it copied the version from my main drive to the backup, erasing all of the work I’d done on the backup version.
I now turn the backup drive off until I’m finished for the day. Now I’m going to have that drink….
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
6 Replies
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Microsoft should sooooo wanna hire you! I hear that their entire Vista team works in like manner – with no complaints whatsoever. 😉
Switch on project backup within AE’s prefs settings. It’s saved my backside on a few occasions.
Cheers
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Ouch. It’s the worst when you can’t blame someone else. Something about screaming “someone please find an Adobe developer so I can shoot him” into the hallway is quite therapeutic.
I usually have AE setup to do autosaves in a single directory (on a local disk not used for production) for all my projects. That way, if I ever loose anything or a disk goes I have my project files (I do this for FCP etc. as well.) I also never touch this folder and it “looks” very different (different folder structure) from my project directories so I’m much less likely to overwrite files that are here. When you’re done with a project you can just go through and delete old autosaves and leave a couple milestones for that project.
–Will
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Already turned on. However, my backup routine is set to mirror the project folder on my PC to the backup drive…deleting files that don’t exist on both. Works great when you are actually working on the project on the PC, and not the one on the backup. I have set it now to ignore AE’s project backups folder.
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
Those here at the office whom I would normally try to blame for such are now referring to this as a ‘Homer Simpson moment”.
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
I am from the old days of “always save”. I save and save and save. An instinct born from old horror stories too, when photoshop 2.5 suddenly crashed after finished applying a filter (rendering time about 45 minutes) to an A4 size document.
“Did you save it?” -said my boss.
Oh, the horror!
By the way, I loved those times. You could drink a lot of coffee on 45 minutes.
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So do I…actually hit Ctrl-S after every couple of edits…just out of habit, and I have Autosave set at 5 minutes with a max of 15 saved versions. Doesn’t really matter when your nightly backup routine is overwriting everything you saved and deleting anything extra.
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions
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