Possibly lost .mlt content

[Yuds2003]

I was working on a short video in Shotcut, and when I exported it the first time, it worked. When I did some more editing and tried to export again, I got an error. To add to that, when I try to open the file now, it appears the contents were lost. Is there a way to recover the contents? Note that there was no autosave. Also, the MLT file is not blank. I’m really nervous about this.

[shotcut]

Auto-save does not save to your project file; it only saves to a hidden folder to recover from a crash. If you go to Settings > App Data Directory > Show… > autosave, you can find them. If the last manual save operation was successful there will be no auto-saved version of that project in there. Shotcut is not backup software; you need to do that part yourself with other software or your operating system. Also, you can attach your project file to a reply and someone might be able to look into it.

[Yuds2003]

I guess Shotcut didn’t save properly or something because when I opened the MLT file, there was nothing in the playlist or timeline, forcing me to redo the whole video from scratch, which I am doing now.

[Elusien]

Why not post your MLT file here on the forum, to see if anyone can help?

Also, to see my backup strategy, especially for large projects, see here:

Entire project wiped after accidentally hitting CTRL+W and CTRL+S at the same time

To cut down on the amount of work needed to create a project that gets corrupted in some way, save your project regularly (e.g. every hour) to a new project name e.g. File->Save As myproject_2.mlt Also, consider backing up your filesystem files incrementally on a regular (say once a day) basis. I have a Windows system and use an excellent (free) backup solution called SyncBackFree. See this very clear tutorial on how to use it: [SyncBack - Backup Software For Windows]

[Yuds2003]

Here it is: Sentence mixing.mlt (575 Bytes)

[Elusien]

I,m afraid the project is lost. The MLT file tou supplied is what you would expect from Shotcut before you even added the first clip - sorry.

Please give some consideration to using a backup strategy similar to the one I outlined above - it has saved me hours of work in the past.

[Yuds2003]

Like I said, I’m redoing the project from scratch.

[Yuds2003]

I finished it and I did “Save As” instead of just “Save”. Is that what I should have done?

[Elusien]

Using “Save” you overwrite the MLT file. Whereas with “Save As” you can specify a different file. If you have a long project and do a “Save” and something goes wrong, you can easily lose the complete project and have to start again. For a short project this isn’t a catastrophe, but if you have spent several days creating the project, those are several days that are wasted.

So my advice would be, for small projects (say less than an hour or two) use “Save”, but for longer projects use “Save As” and create a new version of the project file. Also, do regular incremental backups of your filesystem.