All Work Lost
I was finishing a piece that I had copied from another piece (the title was the same as the original piece it just had an asterisk* on the end) and MuseScore quite unexpectedly about three times. Each time it reopened my music to the full version it had quit from, until the last time when it completely got rid of the copy version and left me only the original non-asterisk titled music. The application repeatedly told me it was auto-saving so I did not think I had to also physically save it. I have looked through the depths of my computer/MuseScore downloads, documents, desktop, etc. to no avail. I have very few saved MuseScore files on my computer so it would be evident if it was easily present.
I am a new composer and I'm very dejected about this because I put a lot of work into this piece and was really proud of myself for finishing my first full composition. I don't have exact memory of a lot of the elements I put into place and I am sad because I was so happy with the particular way I formulated the music. Please let me know if anyone has any guidance!
Comments
MuseScore quite unexpectedly https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/file-formats#msczcomma
Have you checked to see if there is a backup copy?
In reply to MuseScore quite unexpectedly… by Shoichi
Yes, I unlocked the hidden files in my Documents>MuseScore>Scores>.mscbackup and the folder is transparent and completely empty :( I attached a picture
The backup version is only created after opening a file So if you create( a file and do all your work in a single session, never ever closing and reopening it, there is indeed no backup. But normally it wouldn't be needed, if you save your work normally, it's always right there where you saved it.
However, I fear you were confused by what autosave means here. it never actually touches your copy of the file. AIt is always your right and responsibility to manage that yourself. The autosave merely maintains a separate copy, to be used to restore any work since your last save in the event of a crash. It's still assumed you actually save the file yourself regularly, just as you would any other file in any other computer program. In fact, the autosave never ever announce itself, not sure what you saw that fooled you into think that. Autosave happens completely invisibly in the background, you never know it's even happening.
So it's not really clear what actually happened here, but my guess is, somehow confusion about all this led you to not save your work, which would be very unfortunate indeed. Best you can hope for is that maybe the last autosave version contains enough of the work - it would be the state of the last crash, but if you never saved any work since that crash, that would be gone unless you saved it.
The autosave file is separate from that backup, see https://musescore.org/en/node/52116 for more info on where there are stored.
Good luck!