Emergency, hours of work lost, please help!

[Chris Poisson]

Check your autosave vault, maybe there’s something in there. Otherwise SOL I’m afraid. You should make a habit of hitting save every few minutes.

Have a wonderful day.

[Rafael Amador]

By default the Autosave folder is in: Documents> Final Cut Documents.
Rafael

Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17″Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17″
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table.

[Conan Stott]

Thanks guys, managed to find the correct autosave… PHEW!!!! turns out I was looking in the wrong plae but just relieved has a default location 🙂 thank you heaps

Conan

[Lars Fuchs]

I can’t endorse strongly enough Chris’ point of getting the habit of manually saving every few minutes. I try to do it every time I stop to think; I just automatically hit Option-Apple-S. (This saves all open projects, and I often have many open at once. Apple-S only saves the active project.)

I’ve been working with NLE’s for almost 15 years now, and I have been stung by ‘autosaves’ that don’t have a recent enough copy to be useful. It hasn’t happened often, but once is too many, IMO.

On a related note, you may already be doing this, but I recommend creating new versions of sequences as you try different editorial ideas. At a minimum, I make a new copy of the sequence I’m working on every morning. Clients often ask me to show them the version from yesterday, the day before, last week, etc.

[Andrew Kimery]

Glad you found the auto-save, but not having saved in the past 9 hours?!? Major no, no man. As Lars said, save early, save often, and if it’s not saved in two different places it’s not saved at all. I have my projects saved on my system drive but my auto-save vault (which I think is set to save every 10 or 15 min) saves to an external drive. That way if one drive has a complete failure I still have saves on another drive. I really, really don’t like repeating work so I’ve gotten in the habit of hitting Command+S (or Option+Command+S) every couple of minutes if not sooner.

-A

[Arnie Schlissel]

You worked for 9 hours straight and you didn’t save even one time? I’m sorry, but you’re really asking for trouble.

Good work habits include saving your work at regular intervals and making backups.

It’s not Apple’s fault if you fail to do this, and it’s not Apple’s fault if you lose your work when you have problem.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Conan Stott]

Thanks guys, lesson learned beleive me. Oh and I wasn’t blaming apple for my lack of saving my project… just getting a tad frustrated with some stability issues, I dont even try to use motion anymore. But all in all love the software.

Truly lesson learned and I appreciate your help, thank you guys.

Conan.