Recovering a document I didn't save

• Apr 9, 2020 - 21:36

Is there a way to recover a document I thought I saved before I hit "save as" to do another document? I worked 4 hours on it but it seems that I accidentally REPLACED it. Yikes! Thanks, Carolyn


Comments

It's not totally clear what happened here are how "save as" relates to this. Are you saying you didn't save it at all, ever, or simply that you used "save as" instead of "save"? if the latter, that's not a problem, just open the filename you specified when you did the "save as". If you literally never saved it all - no save, no save as - then closed the score or quit MuseScore, and ignored the warning that you had unsaved changed, then I'm afraid it's gone. Unless you got lucky (!) and MuseScore crashes, in which case, the version MuseScore autosaved for you while you were working may still be around, and MuseScore will offer to open it next time you start it. But if you successfully closed the score, MuseScore removes the autosave file.

FWIW, in the future, you should never go for hours without saving, not in MsueScore or any other computer program. I typically hit the save button every few minutes.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

When I close I always say "save" to everything. I think in this case I did "save as" and renamed it something else and wrote new music. I usually save the first document first, then "Save As" and erase the notation that was on the page, and put in m new stuff. I like to do this because the page set up is already the way I like it, fonts, margins, etc.

If I go to the thing I made when I did "save as," it has a new name and new notation. I don't see anywhere that I can "revert" to an earlier thing...

In reply to by smilingharp@gm…

My best guess, then, is that your "save as" strategy failed you here, you accidentally used the same name twice, and ignored the warning when MuseScore tried to tell you were saving over an existing file. Or, you accidentally hit "save" after starting a new score instead of "save as". Either way, if you are on Windows and are using OneDrive, then you can go there to restore older versions.

Meanwhile, I will strong recommend you not continue using this particular strategy. You shouldn't be simply deleting the contents of one score and entering new notes, you should be literally creating new scores, not just to avoid disasters like this but all sorts of other reasons as well. If you have a score set up the way you like and you want to reuse it, simply save it to your Templates folder. Then next time you create a new score the correct way - using File / New - you will see your template there ready to be used. It will be pretty much just like what you are doing except you won't be nearly as likely to shoot yourself in the foot, also some other nice advantages.

Way late responding, but for anyone else who runs into this issue, I managed to find a file I had accidentally never saved, even after manually closing out of MuseScore. Make sure you have hidden files turned on, and go to your C drive. Users> AppData> Local> Musescore> MuseScore4. For some reason, it had named itself New_Project but it had saved 100% of my progress.

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