BR: Project deleted. Tracktion can kiss my arse.

[fromwithin]

Well, that's certainly the final nail in the coffin. I'm trying my best not to rage here, but my heart is racing. I just loaded in one of my recent projects to do final mastering for an album. The project is gone. When I loaded it in the edit, it said that it found a temporary version. I thought, "Well I don't know what that is, I'd better load it and resave it as a different filename just in case there's something important in it". So I chose to load the temporary. It was completely empty and looked like the default edit with 8 empty tracks. The only thing remaining from the original edit are two time signature changes where they were in the original file.

So I thought, "Oh well, I'll just reload it and choose not to load the temporary.". So I tried to do that. Only it didn't ask me whether I wanted to load the temporary. It just loaded the empty one straight up. As far as I can tell, this stupid f**king program loaded in the broken temporary version and then immediately overwrote the original file with it without asking! The modified date is the date and time that I loaded it in. There's nothing in the backups folder either.

Thankfully, I still have the original edit on a backup drive and there's a lesson for everyone: Backups are not just for drive crashes, they're to guard against shit software.

After 17 years, I seriously doubt that I will ever use Waveform again.

[pough]

Yup. I've had that happen before. As soon as you see that question, go to the file folder and back up all the edits you can find.

Opening a temporary version should be a fork, not a knife.

[JohnNoizz]

I can confirm this, happened to me 3 times and the first time I almost went crazy! BUT, fortunately there's and really useful option that Waveform has it and is the automatic saves backups, in the project page on your right side there's "recorded audio" "imported audio/MIDI" "Rendered audio/MIDI" "Movies" and "BACKUP" that backup bring my project alive again, I selected a day before the "erased project" and for my luck it was everything there, well... maybe the latest track that I put in there wasn't but eveything else was

[Watchful]

Every project, no matter what DAW, needs constant backing up.

Trust me as someone who lost 20 years of projects due to a lightning hit.

[vitocorleone123]

1) The DAW shouldn't do that
2) If the DAW does that, you should be prepared
3) If anything else does that to the PC the DAW is on, you should be prepared.

My projects folder backs up to the cloud hourly and to 2 different NAS at different times. I think it was the previous version - or maybe an early beta of this version - that did the same to me, where my project disappeared. Still sucked to lose some of the work, but it was < 1 hr.

[dRowAudio]

We try really hard at Tracktion to ensure your files are safe, up to date and backed up. We do this in several ways, some of which have been discussed here already.

The first is that Edit files are constantly saved in the background as "temporary versions", this is the "Auto-Save Edits" option from the "General Behaviour" settings page. If the DAW or your computer crashes for whatever reason, when Waveform next tries to load that Edit, it will check if there is a temporary version and ask you if you want to load that.
If you choose, yes, this will become the new master for that Edit file.
99.9% this is exactly what people would want and expect to happen. I do understand that in this specific case something has gone wrong though and we'll look in to how that happened and maybe add an option to not automatically overwrite the current Edit file. But I stress again that almost all of the time this is the desired behaviour. Adding new options and questions adds complexity and makes the program more difficult to use so we try to avoid these things when possible.

If something really does go wrong with this procedure, or you simply liked an earlier version of an Edit, as @JohnNoizz says, we have a feature that automatically backs up your projects so you can restore them. This has been very useful to the user base and should help in exactly these kinds of situations.

These temporary and backup files are however stored on the same hard disk and as others have pointed out you can get failures. Corrupt files or even disk failures completely outside of the DAW running can and do happen (I had a complete hard disk failure about 6 months ago and couldn't even boot one of my Windows machines). Because of these things, we really do advise frequent backups of all important files, there are some things that are just completely out of our control.

We hope that you can find a recent version of your project in the "Backups" and as I said we'll look in to improving the "restore from temporary" feature. In the short term I can see us at least adding some additional information to this dialog about when the temporary is from.

[fromwithin]

I appreciate the response, but I disagree that this is expected behaviour. It's very simple: if the user hasn't manually saved the edit to a file then that file should remain untouched.

In the case of loading a temporary file, when a temporary is loaded in nothing should happen to the existing files. When the user next presses save, the contents of the project in memory should overwrite the original edit and the temporary should be deleted. If the user does Save As... and chooses a new filename, the temporary should also be deleted. If the user exits without saving, the disc should remain in the same state before the edit was loaded and next time the edit is loaded, Waveform should once again popup the window saying that it found a temporary edit (probably with an added option to delete the temporary).

Even if it stayed as it is now, the file that is about to be overwritten with the temporary should have been backed up by Waveform before that happens.

Waveform is just too stressful to use now with the mountain of bugs. I've just bought Studio One.

[fde101]

I agree that unless you are going with a full-out "autosave" design as in more supposedly-modern Mac apps, the original file should not be overwritten in this case until the user saves it after loading the temporary.

If you were using the "autosave" design, there wouldn't need to be a temporary file, and no need to ask if to use it.

I don't particularly appreciate the "language" used in the thread title.

[fromwithin]

I don't particularly appreciate the "language" used in the thread title.

When your deadline is tomorrow and you're trying to master an album, and then something like this happens on top of the previous months of wasting days finding ways to work around bugs, decorum goes out of the window.

[pough]

If you choose, yes, this will become the new master for that Edit file.
99.9% this is exactly what people would want and expect to happen.

I respectfully disagree. I would expect it to be open in RAM and from that point have the ability to either "Save" as the master or "Save As" a new version.

Something went wrong enough to create a mysterious temporary copy. Why assume nothing can go wrong by choosing the version created by something going wrong?

[mladi]

If you choose, yes, this will become the new master for that Edit file.
99.9% this is exactly what people would want and expect to happen.

I respectfully disagree. I would expect it to be open in RAM and from that point have the ability to either "Save" as the master or "Save As" a new version.

Something went wrong enough to create a mysterious temporary copy. Why assume nothing can go wrong by choosing the version create by something going wrong?

Exactly that!

99.9%? Are you kidding?

[chagzuki]

If you choose, yes, this will become the new master for that Edit file.
99.9% this is exactly what people would want and expect to happen.

I respectfully disagree. I would expect it to be open in RAM and from that point have the ability to either "Save" as the master or "Save As" a new version.

Something went wrong enough to create a mysterious temporary copy. Why assume nothing can go wrong by choosing the version create by something going wrong?

I've also been caught out by the way Waveform handles this. Now that I've been told that prior versions are still available via a backup folder it might be a good system, but my intuition was similar to others here in assuming there'd be a dialogue box option to save the autosaved new edit prior to the old one being replaced.

[mchoffmann]

If you choose, yes, this will become the new master for that Edit file.
99.9% this is exactly what people would want and expect to happen.

I respectfully disagree. I would expect it to be open in RAM and from that point have the ability to either "Save" as the master or "Save As" a new version.

Something went wrong enough to create a mysterious temporary copy. Why assume nothing can go wrong by choosing the version create by something going wrong?

Exactly that!

99.9%? Are you kidding?

Full ack, i want to open the temporary file to evaluate it and then choose, what to work with in the future. Would be a great feature if WF would give a comparison of the 2 edits to assist in checking the situation.
The file properly saved to disk by the user should by all means stay untouched by the program itself.

Cheers
Marc

[chagzuki]

I'm going through my hard drive as it's getting a bit congested, and I see that Waveform automatic backups are taking up huge amounts of space. I now realize that this is also the reason why the save times get longer the more edits one has in a project, since the backup system is creating snapshots of the entire project which in my case is coming to 4 GB or so... I assume that saving the edit has the effect of doing a major reshuffle of the backup files.

I see that Waveform retains 20 prior backups... and the dates of them looks staggered so that they're less frequent the older they are.

Maybe my strategy of manually saving as a new edit very frequently was unnecessary since the automatic backups retain a lot of prior versions.

[Peter Widdicombe]

Backups are a nuisance - until you need them B-)