Shotcut "failed to open .mlt" and my file is appearing as "zero bytes"

Hi There @shotcut

So i have been working on a youtube video for about 8 hours and have been saving regularly. Today i saved my project and quit Shotcut. I came back after lunch and tried to open it and it says "failed to open (insert name and file path here).mlt and the file’s data shows up as having Zero Bytes. This all happened in the space of about 20 minutes. Im on a mac, is there any way to recover the file? i’ll be gutted if not i’ve spent so long working on it.

I tried to upload the file here but it says “the file you are trying to upload is empty”.

I have contacted apple support about this as well and the file is not visible in icloud or time machine so they instructed me to find out if you can do anything about this?

Hope your well!

If you didn’t make a backup try this:

If I’m working on a long project I often save my project to a new MLT file every hour or so. That way if I really screw up I only lose an hour’s work at most. I also backup all the files that have changed on my system (not just Shotcut) each night to an external drive using a backup utility called SyncBakFree:

Thanks for your response @Elusien

i tried going to app data directory and autosave files but my project doesnt show up here. Im guessing im just going to have to start from scratch again? i’ll keep that in mind though about saving to a new .mlt file. If theres anything else you think i could try please let me know, if not, thanks for your help.

On macOS you can use Time Machine

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