I just lost 2 hours of work because Finale crashed and I had "Reset All Preferences" troubleshooting a problem the day before. So I forgot to set Finale to save every 5 minutes. In Logic X and Ableton Live you can recover your work from the file's Undo history. Finale should do this! I can't even describe how frustrated I am right now.
Hi Matt et al.
First, I'm sorry to hear of your loss of work. That is never a good thing; I do hope you were able to recreate your work. As George pointed out, we did make some improvements in 2014 to incorporate the OS support (both Mac and Win) to recover files when the application unexpectedly quit. But, there is still more work we plan to do that is documented as FIN-4513. While I haven't personally used it, I have heard good things about an app called ForeverSave on the Mac if you are looking for a more robust solution in the meantime.
Cheers,
Michael Johnson
VP, Professional Notation
MakeMusic
This was a feature in 2014.5 I can be sure of, as I experienced many crashes due to bugs.
If you've saved the document at any point during your session, there should be a backup file saved in the "Finale Files" folder which should be in the Windows "Documents" folder; not sure what it is on Mac.
ah man ........... that's really unfortunate. I feel you. I'm not sure how the auto-recovery function could have gotten written out.
I'll tell you though, I make a habit of saving after reaching editing goals--sort of like a checkpoint. CTRL+S is so very close to my fingers not to.
Just lost 5 hours of work. That should speak by itself.
But I am here to say goodbye to finale.
You are very good, but also very bad to me.
Going after someone who maybe is not so good, but is consistently there for me.
And I advise everybody to do the same. Hot and fancy is overrated.
good bye
Rafael, it is unfortunate that you lost work, that is never good to hear about. While we do continually make efforts to make this less likely, I don't think that we could ever say that the potential for data loss is completely 100% unavoidable. I don't think that anyone would make that claim. That's why we have the back up systems in place, so definitely check to see if you have the backup file available, at least you will have something to work with. If you need some help locating these files, don't hesitate to contact us directly.
I just lost 2 hours of work, and for decades my habit is to save every 30 seconds or so. Yet Finale managed to not only kick me out of the program (so frequent I just take it in stride), this time it completely obliterated everything I did this evening. Dell PC, Finale 26-whatever (you had me buy a new program). The program crashed while I was searching through "help" to uncover the mystery behind shortening the stems on beamed notes, stems which are so long you could mount a giraffe using them. WHY doesn't the program just keep stems and lyrics out of the way of each other by default? Is there any music at all, anywhere, where notes are supposed to collide with words? And rests, don't get me going on rests.
Thank you for the additional info, which allows us to rule out system incompatibility. (If you tried to answer my question directly from an e-mail, that is likely why you received a password request. Answering here on the forum should allow you to bypass that if you are logged on.)
I cannot explain why Finale would have quit and erased prior work while you were checking on-line help. It is not typical, but I realize it would be frustrating in the extreme.
Here is the best Finale can offer for batch stem-length adjustment.
To change stem lengths globally
The units are whatever you've selected under Edit > Measurement Units.
Although Finale does adjust note and lyric spacing and a certain amount of help fitting systems on pages, at least initially, it does not attempt the "Magnetic Spacing" (or whatever Sibelius calls it) on a staff-by-staff basis, and that may result in collisions between stems and lyrics requiring manual correction in certain configurations. It is interesting to note that even Dorico, with all its spacing routines, still will, under certain circumstances overlap systems in their casting off. The reason is that the programming to prevent this requires recursive programming that would slow program response beyond what is considered acceptable. Finale, with an older code base and different goals (highly granular control), does not currently support this kind of automation.
Just had a similar experience above (Finale 27, Big Sur).
Was editing beamed note stems and they were stuck - suddenly Finale crashed while simultaneously deleting ALL of the notes in the treble clef. When I reopened the file, 'Undo' was greyed out and I can not find an earlier version of the file.
15 hours of work, gone in an instant right before a deadline...so incredibly frustrating.
Sorry to hear about all of these problems--having similar ones, myself. Finding out that my pc hasn't been putting backups and asv files where Preferences say to, and that the official ways to relocate files have been changed on my pc, leading me to suspect that friends are still being friends, even after they are spammed. Now, that's true friendship!
Best of luck!
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