[Ryan]

I had JUST finished my mission, JUST finished it. was doing the LAST save, and GUESS WHAT!

IT BLOWS UP! i get some stupid error message and loose the ENTIRE MISSION. 10 HOURS of work GONE! IVE BEEN WORKING ON THAT MISSION ALL WEEK!

is there ANY way to get it back!

Error: Failed attempting to reload mission after saving.  Report this bug now!
File:C:\projects\freespace2\code\FRED2\FREDDoc.cpp
Line: 469

Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------


there you go.... i got that error.

[Cobra]

Uhh, as far as I know, unless the coders found some crazy way to do a time-jump, you can't get that mission back.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Look in the mission folder for a .bak file. If that doesn't exist look at the backup.00x files.  Most of it should be there somewhere.

[Cobra]

I've never figured out how to use .baks.

[EDIT] I'll be damned. FUBAR here just taught me something. Thanks mate.

[Ryan]

Look in the mission folder for a .bak file. If that doesn't exist look at the backup.00x files.  Most of it should be there somewhere.

I found the .BAK file for it. What should i do with it please?

[Cobra]

Open it with FRED.

[Ryan]

Open it with FRED.

All it does is open up a fresh mission. I go open with then fred. Is there something else that i have to do?

[Cobra]

Open FRED, go to file>open, set the search parameters from *.fs2  to all files, open the .bak from there. FRED doesn't seem to want to open files correctly by opening them using the Windows explorer.

[Ryan]

Open FRED, go to file>open, set the search parameters from *.fs2  to all files, open the .bak from there. FRED doesn't seem to want to open files correctly by opening them using the Windows explorer.

Cobra: I love you. I love you so much. I love you more then i love pancakes right now!

THANK YOU! that saves me about 10 hours worth of re-writing a mission! How can i ever thank you!?

[Cobra]

Oh please. It was FUBAR's idea originally, I just figured it out myself.

Also, that love thing... kinda creepy.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Actually it's even easier to rename or copy the file to something.fs2 and open it that way.  It also lets it make a new backup just in case.

Cobra thanks for taking the bullet on that love thing.  You can keep it. 

[karajorma]

For future reference the standard proceedure when encountering a corrupt mission is as follows.

1. In your missions folder you'll find 8 files called Backup.00x. Make a copy of these immediately. Do nothing else until you have done that.
2. Rename your mission.bak file to somethingelse.fs2
3. Load it in FRED
4. If that doesn't work, work your way through the backup.00x files you made copies of earlier. Be warned that FRED will make new ones each time you try to load a mission, this is why it was so important to make copies before did anything else.
5. If there are significant changes between the mission you managed to recover and the version that became corrupted you may wish to back them both up and then open them both in WinMerge or whatever diff program you like. Sometimes the corruption is really obvious. And even if it isn't you can often copy across large portions of your work at a time until you figure out what caused the problem.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

For future reference the standard proceedure when encountering a corrupt mission is as follows.

1. In your missions folder you'll find 8 files called Backup.00x. Make a copy of these immediately. Do nothing else until you have done that.
2. Rename your mission.bak file to somethingelse.fs2
3. Load it in FRED
4. If that doesn't work, work your way through the backup.00x files you made copies of earlier. Be warned that FRED will make new ones each time you try to load a mission, this is why it was so important to make copies before did anything else.
5. If there are significant changes between the mission you managed to recover and the version that became corrupted you may wish to back them both up and then open them both in WinMerge or whatever diff program you like. Sometimes the corruption is really obvious. And even if it isn't you can often copy across large portions of your work at a time until you figure out what caused the problem.

You forgot the most important step:

BACKUP IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Either copy the files your are working on to another folder or to a .sav every so often.  Especially if you are going to make major changes.  Also good practice with everything else you do.  I personally do both the .sav and have a subdirectory under missions containing a copy of everything in my missions directory.  I also copy the files up to my file server and backup to tape every day or at least once a week.  Of course I'm a little obsessive about backups but you get the point.