Old 12-12-2019, 12:11 PM   #1
Strokedchevy
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Default Save my life !!

I basically have one long project that I have been recording short riffs on for over a year. I clicked on "crop" ? And it took a small piece and put it on a blank project. Now I can not get back to the rest of my project. Every time I load the project, all that comes up is the 20 second drum beat. I am missing an hours worth of music. The undo button does not do anything. I am literaly gonna cry. Please can someone help me.
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Old 12-12-2019, 12:34 PM   #2
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Do you have any backups?
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Old 12-12-2019, 01:11 PM   #3
Strokedchevy
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I am not too PC savvy. What do you mean by "backups" ? I know that if I go to " open project " , the project is there { at least by name } , but when I open it, Its just this one little snippet. I dont know what happened. How would I find a backup, If I have one ? Im sorry if I am not too computer friendly. Thats why I just kept using the same project over and over
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Old 12-12-2019, 01:13 PM   #4
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Do file save as, look at what that directory is and open that directory in your file manager. There you should find a bunch of RPP Bak files if you had enabled backups
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Old 12-12-2019, 01:24 PM   #5
Strokedchevy
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So, I did that. I see the file name, but its like I erased everything.When I open it, its just the little bit that I cropped. I see all the files, but I guess I changed it somehow or its invisible.
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Old 12-12-2019, 01:30 PM   #6
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I will pay someone if they can help. I will probably sell all of my gear if I lost everything. I could not swallow such a loss.
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Old 12-12-2019, 01:43 PM   #7
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Your raw recordings are probably safe and sound in your Reaper Media folder.
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Old 12-12-2019, 01:47 PM   #8
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Where you saved your project files are where your wave files will be.
They will be saved
Look in your "Project Settings you will find this in the tool box top left.
If you filled this out in order to save your project the "Path to save media files" will let you know where they are and you can just import them again.

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Old 12-12-2019, 02:00 PM   #9
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Your recorded files are still saved somewhere. Their location depends on your project settings:


Keep in mind that you need to overwrite your default project for the settings to "stick" when you press "new project".


To avoid this in the future, you should look at these settings and have your projects autosave every X minutes. Press CTRL + P to open preferences:
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Old 12-12-2019, 02:05 PM   #10
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Are your backups set to happen as displayed in the image above? If so go to that folder under the file save as for your project and you should have lots of RPP BAK files there
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Old 12-12-2019, 02:20 PM   #11
Strokedchevy
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Im working on it. thanks for the help guys, Its just taking me a few minutes to process what you guys posted
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Old 12-12-2019, 04:13 PM   #12
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Did you try undo?!?
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Old 12-14-2019, 11:33 AM   #13
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Click on 'File-Open Project'. When you get the small window to select the file, click to the right of the 'type' menu the the bottom: select 'RPP-bak'. If you haven't saved the new bad project, it might be there.
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Old 12-14-2019, 11:52 AM   #14
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You needed to just be computer savvy to just know to make backups as you go along.
But nobody told you that!

So... shit!

Moving forward... just do a 'save as' every now and then with a new name or adding a number you increment to the name. When you run test renders as you go... name them with the same versioned name. There's also a versioned-save feature if you wish that does the number increment thing for you.

The guys above have pointed out where the preference settings are for auto backups.

To recover your fuck-up:

Open your project (and 'save as' under a new name).
Go to the folder where the actual audio files were recorded to and start dragging in the files to tracks. Drag and drop from the Finder window (Explorer window in Windows).

Some of your audio chunks might originall be from the same track I suppose. You'll likely be able to spot that by the names.

There's an action called 'Move item(s) to source preferred position'
This will move them to the time stamped position they were in the original project timeline. So, if you had items that started later than 0:00.000 (as you do when you "punch in" in the middle of the thing) this will put them back to those spots.

Select all the items and hit that action. (It's under the item menu > item processing.)

This should get you back the project with all the audio in the right spots.

You may very well have to redo a lot of mixing work! Edits too! But at least you'll have the meat of your project back.


Computer 101:
Hard drives wear out or break. Not if. When.
Hard drives are like a little file cabinet installed inside your machine to keep all your stuff. You need to always keep at least a 2nd copy on ANOTHER hard drive. An external for example. It's simply a 2nd copy for when the first hard drive breaks. That lets you buy a new drive and make a 2nd copy again. 3 copies is recommended for being serious.

Likewise, make many versioned copies of your .rpp project files! Losing stuff sucks. You had to learn the hard way because no one told you up front, and I'm sorry to hear that. Hopefully you can recover most of your work - and especially the actual audio recordings! Good luck.

PS.
By chance are you using a Mac and have Time Machine running and have an external drive for a backup?
That would let you fully recover everything if you did!
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Old 12-14-2019, 12:13 PM   #15
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I feel terrible that you've gotten to this situation where you're considering packing it all in because of this. That is about as tough a lesson to learn the hard way as it gets in this field. I hope you are able to recover the file.

FWIW, I do what Serr suggests and manage regular versions of files on my own. So any time I make any semi significant change to a song, I save it as another number. My projects are really weird to look at for someone other than me, but I understand it, and they are in their own folders with a little description beside it..
The folders look like so:
Proj55 - (some description letting me know this from another project)

Then inside the project folder, I have a bunch of RPPs and also my renderings. RPPs look like so:

Proj55.0001.rpp
Proj55.0002.rpp
..etc.

So I've got a lot of rpp's and rpp-bak files to choose from.

I prefer this manual method of versioning because I want control over what gets saved as a new version.

I haven't been irked yet to back this up to another drive or cloud because my music isn't what I'd consider super important. If it was lost, I wouldn't be ecstatic, but I'd start over. I abandon a lot of projects with aplomb too.. it's a skill of mine. lol But seriously, for anyone serious about this.. backing up to other drives or cloud is a must, and Reaper even has settings to automatically do that.

So, first off, I really hope you get your file restored, because it would be a damn shame if you don't. Secondly, if you do get it restored, I'm sure it goes without saying but, heed the advice here of doing proper versioning and backups. Good luck to you.
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Old 12-14-2019, 04:20 PM   #16
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I am perfectly happy to have unlimited automatic backups. I have historical bias against autosaves (for most of my life it meant the program would just interrupt whatever youre doing sometimes for quite a long time) but every time I hit save, it renames the existing saved .rpp first. People get weird about seeing all those files in their project folders, but it doesn’t bother me, and you can stick them in their own folder so you only ever see them when you want to. Frankly, when you go Open Project, you don’t see the backups unless you ask for them anyway.

I only Save As when I’m deliberately branching off to something significantly different that will change the project in a way that it doesn’t represent the whole current working state of the production. This way there’s generally only one .rpp in the folder and, as I mentioned, it’s all I see in the Open dialog.

But Undo is always the first thing to try. I think by default, that history resets either when you Save the project or when you close Reaper (???), but there’s a preference to save the undo history with the project, which allows you to undo “through” save points (unless you did Save As ). For the most part, I find that automatic backups is close enough.

But seriously though, did you try Undo? Cause anytime I do something and the result makes me go “Oh shit!”, the first thing I try is Undo.
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Old 12-14-2019, 04:51 PM   #17
serr
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ashcat_lt View Post
People get weird about seeing all those files in their project folders, but it doesn’t bother me...
Yeah it would be a lack of files where I expected to see them that would be a problem for me!

I make versioned backups 'manually' with 'save as' at milestones along the way. I have auto-backup set for every 3 minutes to a (set in preferences) common directory. Purge it out every so often. It doubles as a running time sheet for what I've worked on too. I kind of don't like losing work.
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Old 12-14-2019, 05:09 PM   #18
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And you can always use my utility to prune them

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=219038
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