Random "can't open file"

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Since switching to 2010 I've been running into a situation that's got me ticked off.

 

Work on a project. Save. Shut down. Go to bed. Get up in the morning. Open Max. Open file "Can't open file. Whatever. OK?" And, well, no, not OK. Not OK at all.

 

If I'm lucky, that's the scenario. Often enough I save the file. Start a new one to test some ideas. Work with that for a while. Go back to the main project and ... "Sorry, couldn't be bothered to open. OK?" But since I've been working for a while my three autosaves got over written so I have to revert back to an earlier benchmark.

 

Anybody else seeing this? Is there more info on it?

 

Save early, save often, change names. Still, it's wrong.

[WAcky]

I did get it yesterday when I had a vray crash due to low RAM. I saved the file and got a "superclass" error or something like that. Then when I tried to open the file(s) I got a "file partially loaded" error...

 

Speaking of max misbehaving. I'm receiving a crazy amount of crashing when using snaps now. All the time. Very frustrating....

[Macer]

I've had a similar error too. Just a random failure to open a file, stating that it is corrupt. Happens once or twice a month to various files. Can't even merge stuff out from it - it becomes totally useless. Quite often if I try and open it a while later, sometimes after a reboot, it will open fine!

 

Very odd and quite annoying!

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Yeah, I have had some luck with the rebooting. But not always.

 

I have been getting lots of render crashes due to ram. (high poly trees. low mem machine.) But often enough it is on files that have been saved properly that I get this.

[Bruce Hart]

Since switching to 2010 I've been running into a situation that's got me ticked off.

 

Work on a project. Save. Shut down. Go to bed. Get up in the morning. Open Max. Open file "Can't open file. Whatever. OK?" And, well, no, not OK. Not OK at all.

....

 

Save early, save often, change names. Still, it's wrong.

 

This exact scenario happened to me just last week. I was working on a file at home, saved it then worked on another project for a while and went to bed. Took the first project file into work the next day and overwrote an older version of the file. Then got the "Can't open file" error, and soon had a sinking feeling that I now had a corrupt max file in two locations. Plus my 3 autobackup files at home had been used to save a different project. Awesome.

 

Thankfully the file I lost was not too important, but it's been a good reminder to be more diligent with incremental saves like you say. Usually I am, but Murphy's Law got me this time. I've since changed the autobackup file number to 10. As to why this happens I have no idea. It's not just Max 2010 though - I've seen this several times on older releases.

 

I used to think that this kind of thing can happen more frequently if you are opening/saving a file from a network location, but I have a stand alone PC at home.