I've been working all day on a pair of patches, and I've been saving their contents regularly. Several minutes ago, PD crashed. When I reopened the only patch that was open when PD crashed, almost everything had been deleted, including things that were in the patch before I even opened PD today. I then opened the second patch, which was an earlier version of the one I had open when PD crashed, and that too had been almost completely cleared out. I tried opening these two patches in a text editor, and found that almost all of the data was missing--the text files had been whittled down to 1-point-something KB in size. So what I'm wondering is what happened, is there some way to recover my work, and how can I avoid this happening in the future (if PD just does this kind of thing at random, I may have to stop using it, because I can't risk losing saved files with lots of time and effort behind them)?

@Polaris That is terrible!...
It has never happened to me personally, and doing a quick google search I can find no other report of this problem. But I have managed to create patches that hung or crashed Pd.
A few questions first....
What is your operating system?
What version of Pd?
Were you using any messaging to Pd itself (inside your patch) like [menuclose( ......?

I would do a search for your filenames..... maybe without the extension. If you are lucky you have in fact been saving them somewhere else (by accident / error somewhere in the directory selection)..... and they could be there on your disk or even an external disk, server, the cloud?

A crashing program will not usually save before it crashes, although the OS could attempt to do so. I would expect the OS to save both files though (current and previously saved) but it might change the extension (or part of the name) of one copy as it does the save......

Good luck....... they should be somewhere.
Then....... make backups, and post back any patch that causes a crash......
David.

My operating system is Windows Vista, and I use Pd extended, version 43.4.

No, I wasn't using any messaging to PD.

Anyway, I ended up having to rework quite a few of my ideas for the project, so in the end, this didn't cause me to lose a whole lot of work. I'm taking extra care now with save files; I back them up in a different folder, and check to make sure that PD isn't producing any 1KB files when it shouldn't be.

@Polaris said:

My operating system is Windows Vista, and I use Pd extended, version 43.4.

Whew, talk about a double whammy of buggy unsupported obsolescence. No wonder you're having such a weird extreme problem that no one else has reported...

If you're really stuck on Vista, I would at least try an up to date supported Pd variant such as PurrData or the latest Pd Vanilla which includes the Deken plugin finder to locate and install any of the extensions from Pd extended you might need.

For serious projects, you should consider using git version control system. It will help you keep track of things as they develop, and you can always roll back to a previous state if things go wrong.

If you had a version of your work saved in a different directory or under a different name at any point in the past, it may be a long shot but you could try a deleted file recovery program like testdisk or photorec to drag up a previous versions. I personally have never experienced any crash in PD quite that bad, but I am using the newer pd-l2ork/purr-data versions in Linux. I hate to be 'that guy' here, but you might think about changing operating systems. Windows Vista has been dated for a cool decade or so by now... and I'm from the school of thought that even the latest Windows versions is 'iffy' when trusting serious work to it. If your hang up is that your computer is too old to run the latest OS that is out there, you may think about running something like lubuntu. That is a distro of Ubuntu/Linux that is geared specifically towards running on older hardware. It's free and will let you run a lot of the newer PD flavors that exist. I have lubuntu running on an old gateway laptop from 2001 that runs old emulators and vintage games surprisingly well. Even web browsing works to a pretty usable degree. There's my 2 cents on the matter...