Urgent Support Needed for File Corruption Issues - Students Losing Years of Work
Good morning. We are experiencing urgent issues with MuseScore at our school, where many students’ files are randomly getting corrupted and turning into 0KB files. This has particularly been happening more with ones saved within file shares.
We have ensured that all computers are running the most up-to-date version of MuseScore, as we saw on forums that older versions could be problematic. Despite this, the issue persists, and more files are being corrupted. For instance, one student saved a new piece of work, and within five minutes, the file became corrupted when they tried to open it again.
We have managed to restore some students’ work through hidden files, but this has not been successful for all cases. We have checked the AppData, backup folders on local computers, and ensured that our school antivirus software is not causing the issue.
We urgently need support to determine if this is an ongoing bug and any assistance on how to prevent this from happening and recover the corrupted work.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
Comments
I'm not sure that you can do much to prevent this from happening as it seems to be an elusive bug which also affected MS3 for a while. You could mitigate losses by using file versioning:
https://musescore.org/en/node/369244
What OS and which version of MuseScore do you use?
In reply to What OS and which version of… by krasko78
Windows 11 - 4.4.3
This seems to be a problem more associated with saving to the cloud. I would suggest also saving to the student's hard drive. And/or doing something like that suggested by yonah_ag above.
In reply to This seems to be a problem… by bobjp
Thanks for the comment, this issue is mainly occurring when saving to the students hard drive. However we are trying what Yonah has mentioned
In reply to Thanks for the comment, this… by patelm2
The MuseScore Studio team would like to work closely with you on this if you don't mind. We have something to propose. Please continue watching this thread, we'll post an update. In the meantime, yes, go with what Yonah has advised.
In reply to Thanks for the comment, this… by patelm2
Good to hear that the MuseScore Studio team are getting involved.
Just in case it helps, this is my personal file versioning scheme when I develop scores:
Scores Folder Structure
• Scores in development start life in the Dev folder.
• When I reach a significant point a copy gets saved to the Milestone folder and uploaded online as private.
• Scores ready for release are saved to the Published folder and uploaded online as public.
Score Versioning - a recent example
The corresponding uploads can be seen in the score's version history on musescore.com:
Usage Notes
Maybe this scheme is a bit too granular for your use but it can be easily adapted. It gives plenty of recovery/rollback options. As you can see, (no versions before 0.8), I delete some of the older Dev files periodically. I typically make a new Dev version after a session of editing, (which may have had some simple File > Saves as well because I don't use automatic saves).
I have made it more manageable via a plugin: