DAZ Crashed - Lost Project!
Geminii23
Posts: 1,328
OMG. I just spent two days working on a new project. Saving regularly. DAZ suddenly crashed while I was adjusting a pose and now I can not open the project file. Everytime I try DAZ just crashes again!
I checked the log files and the only errors I am seeing are:
Error writing author data!
Total class factories: 1261
Creating interface
Successfully created OpenGL viewport for Viewport1.
Successfully created OpenGL viewport for Viewport2.
Successfully created OpenGL viewport for Viewport3.
Successfully created OpenGL viewport for Viewport4.
WARNING: QFile::flush: No file engine. Is IODevice open?
Executing startup script...
Started in: /Applications/DAZ 3D/DAZStudio4 64-bit
DAZ Studio Started
Creating Pixel Buffer
Pixel buffer - Width: 1024 Height: 1024
Compiling OpenGL Shader...
Fragment Shader:
Fragment Shader compiled successfully.
Linking Shader:
Shader Program successfully linked.After some more investigating I am worried that LAMH might be the culprit to my issue. I am using Lycaon Werewolf in this project and it uses LAMH. I currently only have the LAMH free player installed through DIM, but I tried downloading the RC3 that was just released. So far I still can not get back into my project.
Can anyone help me please? This is really depressing.
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So I tried opening a couple other projects that didn't have LAMH items in them and they all opened fine.
Has anyone experienced a crash where they can get a project to open again? Is all my work from the last two days gone?!
Thanks.
It sounds to me as if the Crash has corrupted the scene file. I have had that happen in the past and was not even using LAMH at the time. I never was able to recover the bad file. It did teach me to always work from MULTI save files for every project. At this time I run no less than 4 saves of every project (scene). If the Crash has corrupted a LAMH preset you should be able to recover the preset by a clean install of the content the preset came from. I now keep 2 files of all completed Scenes just to be sure that in the future I can recover my work if one goes bad on me.
I wish I had better news but I'm afraid I don't.
Well, I have been using the FreePlayer so I was not sure if that could be the issue, but I have since uninstalled and reinstalled it. I also just reset my DB and I am reimporting the Metadata. I will try to remove Lycaon and reinstall.
Out of desperation, I just purchased the full version of LAMH (34.95 seemed cheaper than 2 days of my time if it fixes the issue) and I was trying to find out how to install the new RC3 just in case this would fix my issue.
I didn't realize that the Scene file itself could just get corrupted. The last save is from 2:20PM so I had saved about 20-30 mins prior to my last changes. So I don't understand how the save could be corrupt if it still has an older date/time stamp then when DAZ actually had the crash occurred.
This really sucks. I was so close to being done with this latest project and was so happy with it. I can not begin to think about how I am going to rebuild that one from scratch after all the trial and error I had to go through to get things the way I wanted.
Man that does suck, been there, done that. When I first started modeling using 3DSMax, for some reason it wasn't very stable and I learned to save different versions of the same scene as i went and that worked out well since it did crash on me at times. Many years later I still follow the same method and while it can take up more HD space than I like, at least I can usually recover from most app crashes.
I can not begin to think about how much customizing I did on the characters, clothing, posing, lighting, etc.
I feel quite literally sick to my stomach right now.
DAZ Studio defaults to SAVE Scene file as the last Stack command for every update to any scene being worked on. I'm sure you have seen this in action, when you exit DAZ Studio. If DS hit a error it Tried to recover from, that action was probably called just long enough to error the last file in the save Stack. Working with multi backups is a recommended method I strongly suggest for any Program that does auto saves or asks for a save to updates at close. Any SYSTEM error on a PC will try to clear all commands on the stack to SAVE our work for us. This can also be a two edged sword and result in a error in the last file call if it is a read write file. Sometimes the OS is just too smart for its own good, I myself never liked Auto Save or Save after Update. I know When/If I want to keep my last changes to any file. I do not need the program to remember that for me.
Well, so far I reinstalled the Lycaon product from scratch. I reset the DB and also installed the RC5 for LAMH. I guess I am totally SOL on this project.
Greetings,
Just out of curiosity I see you're running Mac OS X; is there any chance you have a time machine backup of an earlier version of the file?
Sometimes the OS seems to keep versions without me even noticing. And if you're using DropBox, you have automatic versioning.
Lastly, make sure to save the file someplace before trying anything drastic.
Once it's safe, I might try things like gunzipping it to see if it's corrupted physically (where gunzip will fail) or logically (it'll decompress but something's screwed up in the format).
Nothing specific that can help, I'm afraid.
-- Morgan
Unfortunately I do not have time machine setup to backup the external drive that most of my DAZ stuff is stored on. I have DropBox but am not aware that it would be or could be backing up all of my data on an external drive.
What is Gunzip?
I've had that happen in the past and it bites. Now I save everything major in a scene as scene subsets as well as as full scenes, and I'll save the scenes in sequential versions, adding a -1, -2, -3, etc. after each major revision. After all, you can always go back and delete the extra steps later to save space, but when you decide you actually preferred the way something looked before you screwed with it for another thirty minutes, it's good to have fallback options.
A file compression utility...more likely than not, it was saved as a compressed file (that's the default, I think).
But yeah, try reading the file with a text editor. The 'new' formats are just plain text files.
Greetings,
A file compression utility...more likely than not, it was saved as a compressed file (that's the default, I think).
But yeah, try reading the file with a text editor. The 'new' formats are just plain text files. Right; the .duf files are actually .duf (a JSON-related format) compressed with GZip. You can uncompress them using 'gunzip' from the command line. (As I said, make a backup first!) That'll typically let you open them in a text editor.
As for DropBox, I more meant that if you were saving your scenes to a directory managed by DropBox (as I do) then they automatically keep a version history for every one uploaded (for a reasonable length of time).
-- Morgan
Poser can crash and corrupt a scene file too, usually happens on a really large file, so not very often. Probably the same for DS too.
As for DropBox, I more meant that if you were saving your scenes to a directory managed by DropBox (as I do) then they automatically keep a version history for every one uploaded (for a reasonable length of time).
-- Morgan
Ok, I was able to open it with StuffItExpander and then open with txt editor. So what would I do now to get the file to work again?
Ok...so it's readable by a text editor. But, it's going to be huge...probably too big to make sense of, but one of the first things to try is to just save a copy of it, uncompressed as a text file, then change the file extension to .duf. It could be the compression got stuffed up and using a different archive manager with more robust features was good enough to 'fix' it.
If that doesn't do anything, try to make sure that there is a '}' on the next to last line,with a blank line (carriage return/enter) after it.
If there are a bunch of lines at the end, there's a good chance that it was truncated.
Of course...do this work on a copy of the file.
Ok, So I tried opening the uncompressed .duf file that I was able to create from opening the original using StuffIt. When I tried to open this file in DAZ, It error out at the same spot and caused DAZ to crash. This time I was able to see that it crashes right when it started propagating the nodes in the Scene view there was a progress bar but I couldn't read anything cause it crashed too fast.
*** Here is a screen shot of the txt file, I see a '}' at the end but no blank line.
SUCCESS!!!!
Thank you all so much for your assistance with this! I was finally able to open the file!!!
So what I ended up doing was opening the file in txt editor and then I searched for everything to do with LAMH and deleted them all. Saved the file and Voila! DAZ opened it finally. My Lycaon character has no hair, but that is better then losing 2 days of work on this scene!
Thanks again!
That was my next suggestion...remove the hair.
Glad it worked and all was not lost.
I've had a nearly finished scene crashing on me on openeing somewhere around a year ago.
I was so desperate I tried everything I could think of and I ended up deinstalling items one by one that I used in the scene.
Until it suddenly opened again!
Turned out one of the items caused the problem (Ibelieve it was a freebie chair).
Used another chair and never installed the other again.
I was to suggest disabling LAMH or get the latest beta from his site as the problem is with older LAMH and .duf, been there myself.
Glad to hear you solved it.
I feel your pain, and this may a route I'll have a look at. I have three scene files (all the same scene, in progress saves) none of which will now open ... Nowhere near the time invested, but four carefully posed and textured V4's, 3 Genesis and 1 Millennium cat all set up in ARTCollab mad lab, with all the lighting set up with UberArea and a nice ground mist with volumetrics ... just about ready for the first main test render. :(
Incremental saves work wonders.
I will shout with the chorus, incremental sequential saves are life and time savers. It's a worthwhile habit to get into to save yourself from these types of scenarios.
Valandar and FirstBastion - precisely what I did! Been a programmer for too long not to have a 'backup plan'. Sadly both 'backup plans' (the pervious saved versions) also failed me! :( They all get the same error (which I cannot for the moment recall) which suggests a 'thing' long lurking in the scene.
One thing I did learn toward the end of building the scene is do NOT scale a figure with LAMH hair on it! :)
Hey Simon my comments were directed in general to the OP not specifically to your post above I understand what you're saying. We all lose time with hard lesson learned, but I do think you make a good point, sometimes the culprit is just sitting there in the scene waiting to cause an error. Just think of the millions of lines of code that represent a scene. It really is a mathematical miracle half this stuff works at all. As someone else mentioned, saving additional scene subsets can help too. It's very time consuming to be redoing stuff, so saving the building block components of the scene in manageable chunks makes sense, and we're all lucky that storage has gotten so cheap.
Not a problem, I understood what you meant - it's just one of those things worth re-iterating! :)
In my old job the number of times I had to shout, scream, have histrionic fits to have a backup/recovery test of a newly commissioned live service server/application. Despite time being set aside for such tests, they NEVER got done due to slippage elsewhere. Back to DS, which for me, is 'just' a hobby with no revenue stream or deadlines associated with it, it is too much of a 'faff' to save a scene, shut DS, restart DS and reload the scene to prove that there's no an underlying error.
As you say, there's so much going on under the covers and with 3rd party plug-ins muddying the waters, it is astonishing my computer does not stomp of fin a fit of high dudgeon and refuse to open DS until I sacrifice a virgin capacitor ... ;)
No question about it, I got burned once that was all I needed, you can always delete the increments later when your done if space is an issue.
Greetings,
I wonder if it's possible to make a script that does incremental saves for you, so you don't have to 'think' about what you're naming them, etc...
-- Morgan
p.s. Congratulations to the OP; I'm thrilled that you got it recovered!
This is another example of what a wonderful community we have here at DAZ. Congrats to the OP.
I am one who tends to oversave, if there is such a thing. Just getting a figure shaped, dressed, hair, and posed I might have over 10 saves. And that is a single figure before any scenery is added. I do wish there was a way for Studio to do incremental saves for me, but I don't know many programs that offer that option. Occasionally, I will use a revolving set of 3 - 5 files as the saves, but that means paying attention to which one I last used. It's just easier to use the next letter or number, whichever method I am using in that series. My badness is that after I finish with my final render and final scene save, I seldom go back and delete all of the old ones. I know I will when I start running out of drive space, but I still have a long way to go before then.
Double-plus kudos to the OP ... I've just edited my plaintext version of the .duf file (all 108MB of it!) to remove the LAMH data and it loads! ;)