Greetings,
So I’m a bit downtrodden. I use FLstudio as my DAW, but recently, I had to reinstall Windows due to non-DAW issues. (thankfully, it’s not a virus, just Windows being screwy)
Upon reinstalling Vital and all my other plugins, I was dismayed to see that any patch I’ve made had been reset to the initial patch. So, all the custom sounds I’ve made for my projects are gone.
Well, not to be deterred, I grabbed my User presets from the backup of my system before reinstalling Windows. Sadly, Vital did not detect that I did that and still loads projects that had Vital in them. Thankfully, if I manually load the presets, it can apply them. But here is the problem: I have 100+ Projects where I didn’t save a preset (vital or FL) and made custom sounds for that particular project. And now… they are gone.
Things I’ve tried:
- Installing the vst2 and 3 versions of Vital.
- Load FL projects directly from the backup. (temp mount the hard drive clone) Still did not work.
- I transferred known Vital User presets over, but Vital fails to load the User presets and defaults to initial.
If I can’t load these, I’ve lost at least 2 years’ worth of sound design work…
There is one last option, and I’m terrified: Rebuild my old windows and save the presets of EVERY project. T_T I pray there is a way to save my old patches.
I hope someone here can save me from that nightmare.
Hey man, very sorry to say, but any patch that is not specifically saved will be lost upon a system wipe or re-install. To my knowledge, the only solution is proactively saving presets while also ensure the project files are backed up. There’s always hope, I’m certainly not a system genius on these things, but I’ve been here before without any luck.
My current system for backing things up:
Everything audio related is on a specific hard drive (for me E:// is an internal ssd I have.)
I have regular back ups scheduled every month (I have an additional internal drive for back ups but used external drives previously)
You can and should make this more frequent, say weekly or daily, depending on what you do. I’m just a hobbyist so I only have a handful of sessions a month, if that makes sense. I know professional mix/engineers that back up their system automatically twice a day since they deal with customer projects etc etc.
Anyway, back to the stuff I do: I have my Music Production drive back up regularly. Furthermore, once or twice a year I go back through my projects (I keep track of the last project I saved) and do the following:
- freeze (I’m in ableton) any tracks. Duplicate and flatten to audio. (So there’s always what was there evn if plugins stop working.)
- resolve any errors (missing samples, files or plugins)
- export any samples I made or that I like. (Expanding my personal collection of creations, so to speak)
- save any presets in any synth or device that I made or that I like. (Again for my own stuff, or favourite the ones I’m using, for example)
- decided if I want to export the stems of the project (if I really like them, say the drums I can re use, etc or maybe I really loved the pads this project, you get it)
- export a full bounce of the project/beat/sound design/etc. So I can always listen to it later without opening the project or say show my friends a beat, whatever
- (in ableton) I choose Collect All and Save which ensures any and all samples, clips, etc get saved into the current project (instead of their original location) this means everything in the project is actually in the project and not pulling from other locations.
I know this doesn’t hp your situation and that you’re on FL, but I can only encourage you to set up some proactive method of recovery. It’s the only way I’ve been able to rebuild after a drive or full system failure. Hopefully my framework can inspire you or help you think about what might work for you.
It is boring? Kinda. Is it tedious? Definitely. But it’s the only way I’ve found that truly helps you if things go wrong.
TL;DR: Please make sure you back up your computer and make sure to save your presets, Samples, and files separately. This ensures not only do you have the big system back up, but you also have all the important pieces for your DAW in case the worst happens.
Best of luck, just know you’re not alone every producer will lose a hard drive at some point and it’s the f***ing worst!
Hey, thanks for the reply, friend.
I may have a solution. Like a smart cookie, I did clone an image of the system pre-wipe.
It’ll be rough, but I may be able to temporarily boot up a virtual machine to load FL Studio and grab those presets.
You make fair points and will start ensuring presets are backed up and saved. Thanks for the empathy, boy howdy is this gonna suck to do, but I’ll be worth it in the end.
And to those with a similar issue, follow this one’s advice; if it’s too late, pray you have a clone of your hard drive like me.
Nice! Glad to hear you had a full back up, you can definitely dig deeper, you can compare project save file data from the current project to the old and try to find what’s missing,
I think this involves going through the file info manually though, which is also lots of work
If @pb1 is around he might be able to help you know what to look for in the save (I dont think he’ll be around lol), but his steps that may help (or you just skip to looking through the flp manually)
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Copying the same VST/VST3 file from one computer to another (if on second computer projects opens and Vital opens, but there is only INIT preset inside - that means chunk data may be from newer version of Vital). Low probability since there is no new Vital version from a long time, but who knows.
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Save project on new DAW version, unpack both of them (old project and new) and check if there is any difference with plugin data (identifiers, chunk headers etc). This may help to restore important project by made changes in old project.
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Try older DAW version (someone else suggested that before) - even on Virtual Machine (may be faster for tests - less uninstalls/reinstalls etc)