File is no longer on my computer

• Sep 7, 2021 - 15:56

I am a new Musescore user, and I just spent about 3-4 hours on a score. I was saving religiously throughout my entire time working on it, and made sure the file was there. When I went on Musescore today, the file was gone. All my other files I had worked on are there, but the one I am looking for is not. I am on Mac OS 10.15.7 and using Musescore3. Does anybody know where my file could be? This is an issue I have had once before, but the last file I lost was not nearly as important as this one.


Comments

The file is not saved "in MuseScore", the file is saved on your disk. When you open your regular OS file explorer (is it called "Finder" for Mac?) and you navigate to the place where you have saved your file, do you find it?

To be clear: if you saved your file, then MuseScore would have asked you to give it a filename and to choose a folder to save it to. Unless you yourself moved it (did you check your trash folder?), or your hard drive is failing (which is possible, but not likely) that file is still right there, in exactly the same folder you saved it to, with exactly the same name you gave it. The trick will be remembering what folder you chose so you can look for it. macOS provides a utility that can search your entire hard drive for files, as described previously, so be sure to try that.

In reply to by samhuntpowers

If you truly saved it to that folder and it's gone now, then I'm afraid you drive is failing and should be replaced. But, are you really 100% sure that's the folder you saved it to? You verified that was the folder selected when you first saved? And if you go try to save a new file, that's the same folder that it defaults to now (it always defaults to the last-used folder)?

In reply to by samhuntpowers

Sorry, but there really isn't any other possibility here. MuseScore never deletes any of your files. So If you truly saved to that folder, then either you accidentally deleted it yourself, or the drive is failing. Personally. my best guess is still that the file was saved somewhere else. Have you tried the experiment I suggested yet - trying to save a new file to see where it defaults to? Do you have "time machine" enabled? Does it log file creations or preserve backup copies?

If there was a crash at some point while you worked on the file, and you then elected to restore the previous session, that copy of the file was recovered from a special location internal to MuseScore, not your normal scores folder, and it's possible you simply re-saved that recovered copy backto that folder. But in the case, you'd normally at least still have an older copy of the file in the original location. Unless perhaps the crash occurred before you ever saved the file. In which case, your file save should have triggered the normal file dialog allowing you to choose a folder but it probably would have default to the autosave location not to your normal save location. in that case, the file is probably there in the autosave folder.

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