Hi there
Just thought I’d share something of a success story in retrieving lost data after failing to save my project properly. I frantically searched the forum after I realised I had lost a lot of work and couldn’t find much apart from “lesson learned, remember to save as you go next time” whichmight be useful advice but not what I wanted to hear. Hopefully my experience can be useful for others as it turns out there is another way.
I had been working on a project and made some changes I wanted to undo so I thought I’d restore to where I had started when I turned the octatrack on that morning. I restored the project, not realising this would bring me back to the last time I had manually saved the project (as opposed to the autosave that happens when you power down the machine), which was months ago. I was devastated, so many banks and patterns were gone.
After searching this forum and not finding anything, I looked into data recovery software, chose ‘Easeus’ which is free, and used it to scan the octatrack project folder in question whilst the octatrack was in USB transfer mode. The software found ‘deleted files’ and ‘directory intact files’ (which I think are currently existing files that it can find previous versions of).
There were a lot of files accross the two above categories:
arr01.strd, arr02.strd…etc
arr01.work, arr02.work…etc
bank01.strd, bank02.strd…etc
bank01.work, bank02.work… etc
I could organise them by ‘date modified’ so as to find the ones from before I made my restore mistake. There was some confusion around this until I realised the time and date on my octatrack was two hours behind so it had been timestamping them wrong, but once I realised this I could factor it in.
As far as i undertsand it (maybe someone could clarify) the .strd files are from when the project is saved, and .work is from autosaves?
I made a copy of the project folder and replaced certain files within it with files from the recovery software that seemed to be from when I was last working on that particular bank. Then I loaded the modified project into the octatrack.
The results were far from perfect, with some patterns being messed up with the wrong samples, some patterns being missing from banks, etc. So I’ve had to keep making copies of project folders and keep tinkering. I now have about 5 projects, with some of them having bank 3 more or less intact, another with bank 4 intact, etc. It’s a relief to have most of my work back, even with them being inconveniently spread accross different projects. I’m going to try now and get them all in the same project by cross-referencing sample slots, saving parts etc (I’m sure this last bit would be easier if I were willing to shell out for octaedit)
One thing to bear in mind is that when octatrack opens the project that you’ve been replacing files in, new files (.work i think) are created. So if you want to then tinker with the folder some more, remember to delete these newly created files.
Hope this is useful.