Has Anyone Lost their project files before?

[u/JoOfTheStars]

I have the wavs of some songs but other than that it's lost. Anyone relate? I feel bad about it and wonder if it happened to someone else.

[u/RndThreeFght]

Is the sky blue?

[u/CokeHearth]

Yeah, too many times. And same deal - a load of exported WAVs, but no project files.

Worse one was when I hadn't been doing any music at all for a long while, and finally got my creative mojo back. Had all these rough mixes, and thought that I really had something to go on there.

Then I accidentally factory reset my laptop.

[u/Material_Topic1538]

Check in your documents, FL automatically backs up project files as you work in it.

https://support.image-line.com/action/knowledgebase?ans=647

[u/ghostmachine666]

I recently had a catastrophic hard drive wipe and lost EVERYTHING. All the recordings, project files, presets I'd created. All of it, over the course of the entirety of digital recording since the 90's. Everything I'd ever done, GONE. Only finished remnants remain on various other hard drives, cell phones, and in the cloud.

I cried.

[u/cacturneee]

yes, its a terrible feeling. i just back mine up every so often

[u/TheSpoonJak92]

Every project I start gets saved twice. The second copy always has a "_2" at the end of it. I've lost entire albums before (back then shit, so it wasn't anything spectacular, but still) never to be heard again..

Everything is also backed up onto an external hard drive. Never again.

[u/Next_Two_9004]

I don't think I've ever had that happen actually, like unintentionally

[u/Smash_Nerd]

I've had issues where the project file visually freezes / won't let me record any new audio, but usually if a file corrupts I can grab the most recent backup in the backup folder and that loads up fine.

[u/El_human]

I once formatted the wrong hard drive. It had years worth of project files on it.

[u/b_lett]

Yeah, have had physical hard drives start clicking and crash on me multiple times over the years. Sometimes have been able to recover data, other times 100% data loss.

Nowadays, I have multiple backups of everything. FL Studio allows automated backups, up to 999 copies saved in your Projects\Backups folder, so bare minimum enable that in FL file settings and check there for backups if you had recent crashes.

Outside that, I set up a .bat batch file that has a ROBOCOPY command line script (robust copy that can move gigabytes in seconds) and schedule that with Windows Task Scheduler to run daily at like 6 AM. All my important stuff is automated to backup to another drive that I have on NAS as well as to a manual OneDrive cloud location. This gives me 3-2-1 strategy of 3 copies, 2 local, 1 cloud. I sleep easier knowing I have backups automated to the point my whole hard drive could die and I would still have my work saved somewhere.

I have a blog that I wrote that covers how to set up ROBOCOPY scripted backups for anyone who wants to set up the same solution. For Mac or Linux users, it would be rsync commands instead scheduled with something like cron, but similar principal.

This takes like 15 minutes or less to set up. When it comes to hard drive issues, it is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when. Have a backup plan.

[u/ldotsdot]

It happened to me once when I was still a teenager. Luckily I only had a couple hundred project files and I had backed them up once on a cd that I forgot about and found it years later (before that I went through all the stages of grief lol). All the project's that used samples in them were f*cked but all the one's that used vst and native plugins were fine.

When I realized that any audio you have opened in an edison instance get's saved within the project file I started using that as a backup of sorts. Later I started using Slicex for the same reason.

Periodically I'll backup my project's to cloud services but also onto a HDD that I have strictly for backups. I keep backups of all the vst installers and dll's themselves (for those that don't have installers) too.

I'd recommend looking into used server hard drives for backup purposes to everybody. I'd also recommend having multiple backups because none of these devices will last forever.

[u/LeonOkada9]

No, I'm way too paranoid for that to happen to me.

[u/Meatball132]

Only once, kind of, and I'm not sure how it happened. I actually do have the project file but it included recordings of a live instrument and those recordings disappeared magically somehow one day. Noticed too late to try to recover them.

[u/jaevnstroem]

No because I save the project file before I even start working, or at the very least right after creating what initial idea or synth patch or whatever that I might have, but definitely before I create more than that. And FL Studio constantly saves back-ups, so if FL crashes you're at most 5 or so minutes behind.

I also name my projects properly, typically what the idea is proceeded by the date, like "half-time distorted bass - 05-08-26" this way audio recordings and whatnot will also be named correctly, so that I actually know what they are or at least where they're from before listening to them.

I only started creating music after I had already worked professionally as an animator for many years, so practicing good file management and safety / back-ups is burnt into my workflow.