Everything Gone
Opened up Musescore tonight...only to find all my songs BLANK...totally reset to brand new files with not even a title or anything...Just about panicked...but after searching here on the forum, I discovered there was a backup folder & in it were uncorrupted backup files & I was able to open those & restore my HOURS of work.
I'm the only one in the house & it was multiple files, not just ones I was working on the last session I had Musescore open so it's not something I did accidentally, if there even was a way to do that accidentally.
Anyone had this happen & been able to figure out why? I'd love to prevent it from happening again.x
PC with Windows 7 Professional with Service Pack 1, Running MuseScore 3.5.2.311459983.
Comments
I don't know how MS can have deleted or blanked all of your files but nor should any other program have done that without you telling it to. The safest way to avoid this is to create backups of you music files and pf any other files that are important and store them in a separate physical location. Cloud storage is also useful but not infallible.
In reply to I don't know how MS can have… by underquark
I don't know either, all I know is hours & hours of work was gone. 3 songs, 2 completed, one 2/3 of the way done, with both the piano score and lyrics. I'm going to create separate backups from now on as well...not sure why it happened, but thank goodness the backups were still there, untouched in the backup folder, but I don't want to take a chance that they'll get corrupted too. Thanks.
Do you mean the scores are no longer visible in your start center or recent files list? MuseScore doesn't delete files off your hard drive, ever. I'm sure they're still located in the directory where they were saved. This location can be found by opening Edit->Preferences and looking the the "Scores" directory under the General tab. Paste this address into your file explorer and you should see all of your scores.
In reply to Do you mean the scores are… by mike320
No, the files were there, visible in the recent files & in the start center & in the folder where I saved them, but there was NOTHING in them. I'll upload a file that showed what it looked like...although it's not one of the actual files that were corrupted because I already restored those from the backups.
In reply to No, the files were there,… by genie86333
Now that I think about it, I did have a power outage & I don't remember if I'd closed MuseScore before the outage, although I do know I had saved and closed the file I had last worked on. I don't know how a power outage would corrupt files that weren't even open, but something happened & that was the only out-of-the-ordinary thing I can think of that happened.
In reply to No, the files were there,… by genie86333
I'm not sure how that could happen. I can't imagine MuseScore doing that by itself.
In reply to I'm not sure how that could… by mike320
I can't imagine either...if it was just one song I would have guessed maybe I somehow accidentally selected all & then hit delete, but it was more than one song & the others hadn't even been opened in a few days. But trying to recreate the situation to see if I could have done that accidentally, I can make it select all the notes and lyrics and delete them, but not the notes AND the title/composer/etc AND the extra hundred or so measures I'd added, which don't disappear when you select all & hit delete. Anyhow, at least there are backups, so I didn't lose everything. Thanks for help trying to figure it out.
In reply to I can't imagine either...if… by genie86333
I will tell you there is a bug that has been known to fill the .mscz file with spaces or start at a certain point in the file and do that but your situation is totally different.
If you ran a batch file on musescore files it's possible the batch file has a bug that could do that. MuseScore won't save to an unopened file on its own, which is what would have had to happen for what you describe to have happened. I'm continuing to engage you in conversation in hopes of preventing this in the future by discovering the cause.
What's most likely is that you are simply opening the wrong copy of the file, looking in the wrong folder. Be sure to carefully check the exact pathname of the folder you are trying to open the file from and compare it against the exact pathname of the folder you believe you saved the file to. Check the last modified date to be sure it really is the version saved when you think it should have been. If necessary, use whatever search facility you might have in Windows 7 to search your entire drive - you might find the folder somewhere other than where you remember it being.