Comments on: Damn it!

Question: Damn it!

spicynuts — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 11:36:57 -0800

Hit save instead of save as in garageband and lost 90% of a song. Any chance to recover lost files? DO NOT HAVE TIME MACHINE OR ANY OTHER BACK UP AVAILABLE. This is on a powerbook

By: bensherman

bensherman — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 11:44:33 -0800

no.

By: jsturgill

jsturgill — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 11:49:35 -0800

Are you on OSX Lion? There may be a version of the old song that you can access.

By: zachlipton

zachlipton — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 11:56:29 -0800

What version of OS X are you running? There are local (limited) Time Machine mobile backups starting in Lion. Try opening Time Machine and see if you get anything?

And I assume it's too late to undo your way out of this?

By: bonobothegreat

bonobothegreat — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:00:04 -0800

IIRC, I was able to recover some deleted GB tracks by going to the project file in the Finder and right clicking to "show package contents". The deleted sound files were still in there and I was able to copy them and re-import them.

By: spicynuts

spicynuts — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:03:51 -0800

Nope. Poop.

By: spicynuts

spicynuts — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:05:24 -0800

Yup.., no undo, no versions or auto save, no show package contents. Looks like i am
SOOL.

By: jsturgill

jsturgill — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:26:43 -0800

I believe dropbox stores versions of files as they change. Start saving your active projects there.

By: RolandOfEld

RolandOfEld — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:35:12 -0800

Dropbox does do versioning (insofar as it retains older versions of a file) but really may not be suited for files that change constantly and/or are larger. I'm 99% sure this aspect of dropbox is only available via their web interface, but is always enabled and acting invisibly behind the scenes.

By: jsturgill

jsturgill — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:20:53 -0800

Even if dropbox's versioning is imperfect and awkward to access, it is also entirely transparent to the user, requiring no fiddling about or management. Huge plus.

Large files and frequent changes will not break anything.

Past versions don't count against your storage quota.

It won't kill your bandwidth, either.

30 days of safety is a huge margin of error for this kind of accident.