Failed to load project ‘***’. Please check database log for more details

[Michael Gissing]

have you made any backups over the past 6 months or just used the one project. I make a habit of occasionally doing a save as so I can jump back to earlier versions and I also do a project export as a backup to another drive. Did you also have auto save on?

It might be worth contacting Blackmagic with the database log to see if they can help with project retrieval.

[Geoff Johnston]

I made a backup version three months ago. Most of the work I did has been since then, which is a lot of grading.

Sending the project to BMD sounds like a good idea, in fact, it’s probably the only option I have now. Thanks for your reply, Mike.

By the way, does anyone have any experience with data recovery software like Photorec and Data Rescue? I’m using them to look for past instances of my Project.xml file, but so far I am only finding the most recently saved version of it.

[Marc Wielage]

[Geoff Johnston] “I made a backup version three months ago. Most of the work I did has been since then, which is a lot of grading. Sending the project to BMD sounds like a good idea, in fact, it’s probably the only option I have now. …By the way, does anyone have any experience with data recovery software like Photorec and Data Rescue? I’m using them to look for past instances of my Project.xml file, but so far I am only finding the most recently saved version of it.”
ProSoft’s Data Rescue saved my sorry, tired ass about 8-9 years ago and recovered a 2TB drive that had been thoroughly whacked. My sad story was that I had a crash while backing up a drive, and the crash was severe enough that both the source drive and the destination drive were clobbered. Luckily, I had a double-secret emergency backup from the day before, and just lost about 12 hours’ of work (which I was able to redo in about half that time). The recovery took over 24 hours but did work.

I think it’s a good idea to backup your project DRP file(s) on a daily basis, and backup your database on at least a weekly basis, just in case. Some of these problems happen because of OS-related issues totally outside Resolve’s control.

[Geoff Johnston]

For anyone who is having this problem and scratching heads in sorrow, here’s a partial workaround that should save the work you did in your corrupt project.

If you are in the habit of grabbing stills, then your grades and nodes are in /DaVinci Resolve/.gallery/ on your hard drive. It’s a hidden folder, so you’ll have to “show hidden files and folders”.
For MAC users, the full path is ~/Documents//DaVinci Resolve/.gallery/

Usually, when you export a still from DaVinci Resolve, it’s saved as a .DRX file, and all the grading you did on that specific clip is stored inside that file.

If you didn’t export your stills, there is still a way to salvage all the stills you had in your gallery.

Here’s a procedure written by a BM tech support:

“you will need to do a little bit of a manual work.
Make a duplicate of the hidden (.gallery) folder in a safe location—in that folder drill down until you find there files in each directory—name.DPX, name.xml, different–name.xml. Change extension of the xml that has the same name as the DPX file to .drx. Do not change the other XML After that you will be able to import that still with its grade. You will have to do this for each single set of 2 XMLs and a DPX.”

I hope this helps anyone who have had a project crap out on them.