"fake" saves??

[Brodie3D]

Ok… I’m not crazy… but I have NO idea what has happened. This is certainly been a terrible start of 2011 for me and zbrush… First all my current work files from the past month are useless because they’re too big for Zbrush to read (even though Zbrush can create them… WTF?) Something I’ve seen others in the forum have issues with, etc…

and now…
well…

I’ve been having to make up for the weeks of work I lost and have managed to make pretty good time getting there. Saving incrementally and alternating between 3 different files to save to… “just in case”!

Yesterday I even rebooted my computer just to make sure as much memory was free as possible before I get too much further in Zbrush… loaded my file back up and went right back to work…

Today while working on a file… inevitably, Zbrush crashed… out of memory… despite it being the only program running, having over 8 gigs of HD space and 4096 allocated under mem prefs for Zbrush… also my files are under 2gb a piece…
Anyway, I restart my computer, restart Zbrush… and this time when I go to load my file… I notice the most recent date of saves is from the 12th? Today is the 17th! Where the heck did my saves go? Absolutely NO idea what has happened. I’m very organized with my files… aside from being 110% certain that I have saved MULTIPLE times over the past 4 or 5 days… I actually restarted and LOADED a current tool just yesterday (the 16th)… So I know it was there…

I’m freaked out a little… I don’t use CTRL S, I always use the tool menu to save… always take my subtools down to their lowest division first… all those lil steps to make sure Zbrush doesn’t crap out…

In short… all day today I’ve been saving on files which dates read 1/17/2010… after the crash… none of them read that… they read 1/13/2010 and none of my work that I’ve done since the 13th is present… like false saves… or something…

Anyone else ever have this happen? Am I high? After loseing weeks of work… now to be set back AGAIN 5 days… AGH!! I’m frustrated beyond belief…

[Brodie3D]

Ok… Now I’ve done some troubleshooting… and I still have no idea what the issue is… although I now know it’s not just a fluke…

When I save over an existing file… Zbrush asks if I want to save over it, I say yes… then the icon for saving comes up… it thinks awhile… then says file was saved successfully…
but when I check the file… it didn’t actually save anything. I tried this with and without Zbrush set to run as Admin…

Only way I can save is if I save a brand new file each time… which means delete old files as I go… or I’ll run outta HD space by the end of the week…

Wow… I mean… at least it’s something I know i can DO… another thing to work around and keep in mind to keep Zbrush working as it should…

Any ideas?

[aurick]

ZBrush 4 has an anti-corruption failsafe feature to prevent corruption of files caused by a failed save.

If you are saving a new file and something causes the save to fail, no file will be written at all. This means you won’t get in a situation where you go to open the file only to find out it can’t load. The easiest way to check that your save was successful is to simply look at your directory and see if it’s there. If it is, the save was successful. If it’s not, then something caused the save to go bad. If a second attempted save fails, then something is genuinely wrong (as opposed to a computer hiccup).

If you are writing over an existing file and the save goes bad, ZBrush will not replace the existing file. It sounds like this is what has started happening to you. This is meant to prevent you from going to open your file later on, only to find out that it won’t load and you’ve lost everything you’ve done on it. Here, you can check to see if the save was successful just by looking at the file’s date. If it matches your most recent save, the save was successful. If it’s old, then something prevented the save from being done right and ZBrush’s failsafe kicked in to save your work from corruption.

As for why this is happening to you, the most likely situation has to do with system resources. It might be that your hard drive is running out of space. It might be that your drive has a lot of fragmentation, preventing ZBrush from being able to find large enough blocks of space to work with. It could also be that a virus and/or spyware is draining your system’s resources so that ZBrush doesn’t have enough to work with.

Saving is pretty system intensive, believe it or not. Saving over existing work requires even more resources than a new save. This is what’s leading me to believe you’ve got a space or RAM issue – you’ve got enough resources for fresh saves, but not enough for an overwrite. That’s backed up by the fact that you say if you don’t delete files you’ll run out of room quickly. In order for Windows’ defragmentation application to run correctly, your drive must have a minimum of 15% free space. If it has less, you’ll slowly become more and more fragmented even if you’re defragmenting every single day!

[Brodie3D]

Thanks for your reply Aurick…
If I am to understand what your saying… zbrush has a fail safe to keep me from corrupting my files on save… and that’s why it won’t save… because it’s protecting me. But like I said… if i try to overwrite a file… it won’t work… if i just save a new file… it works fine… so i’m not sure the “failsafe” thing applies here since i am able to save in some instances… not sure

As far as how my side of things looks… Zbrush is the only program I run when I work in it, because I am aware of it’s need for resources… my computer is only about 6 months old and is packed to the brim with memory, cpu’s and HD space (over 400 gb + a backup HD which is another 400+gb)…My HD is also new… I doubt that it’d be that fragmented in such a short amount of time… though I suppose it’s something I can check… it also goes through a complete virus/spyware scan every evening. I’ve even gone as far as scanning my memory to make sure I don’t have a bad stick… they’re all perfect.

I guess what I’m getting at is that I don’t believe the problem to be my computer. The resources are there… more than Zbrush can use apparently (32bit)… but your point about it taking more ram to save over a file than a new file is something to consider… I didn’t know that, so I’ll definitely will keep that in mind going forward.

I guess I’ll do another clean reinstall of Zbrush and see if that irons anything out…

[harbottle]

I just had a similar thing happen. I generally save new versions of a file every few hours or whenever I make a major change. I include a description of the change in the filename to make things easier to find if I ever need to go back. In between these saves, I usually just save as an overwrite. Well yesterday I had a few large tools open at the same time. I was in too much of a hurry to close and re-open ZBrush, but I was concerned about system resources and crashing, so I deleted all subtools of the tool I was no longer working on, then deleted the last subtool, which cleared the tool from the list. I continued to work on the other tool for several hours, saving overwrites along the way. I checked and the saves were timed and dated accurately so I knew things were going okay. Eventually I needed to open another tool to borrow a part from it. I thought this might be pushing my luck, so I saved, closed and reopened ZBrush. I went to open my original tool…and it wasn’t in my folder. Only the earlier versions. I did a search for it on my computer, thinking maybe I had saved it in a different place without realizing it. The search found the named file, but said it was a broken link. The file was gone. However, there was a new file that I never created in the folder. It was a giant obj. called “head”. When I tried to open it, ZBrush crashed. Obviously it was corrupted. At this point I was starting to panic. I HATE losing hours of work. I was also starting to think I was going insane. I have never heard of such a thing. How can a program DELETE a file when closing??? I thought I must really be losing my mind. Then I remembered that I had recently bought a program that will sync everything in one folder with an external hard drive, keeping the two folders exactly the same. Maybe, I thought, it will still be on the external backup drive. Nope. Gone there, too. I couldn’t imagine what could have happened. Then I noticed a little trash can icon in the sync program interface. It was labeled “Items Thrown Away”. Well, I thought, let’s look in there…Bingo! there it was. Saved exactly as it was when I closed ZBrush. THIS is how I KNOW ZBrush independently deleted my file. On its own. With no direction from me. It would have been lost forever without the sync program.

What do you make of that, Aurick?

Thanks,
Will