Crash and Lost Day of Work - Missing Saves ?

This is only the second time that I've had DR crash (16.2.7.01) since October. First time I didn't lose too much info.

I poked around in the program settings and didn't see any kind of automatic save every XX minutes back then.

Rather than dig through the manual, I just manually saved every once in a while when completing a section of work.

Apparently a huge mistake as hitting project save doesn't apparently save all the time ???.

Well, today I lost the whole days work. DR crashed and when I opened everything backup, my work was missing.

I had saved at least four times today after completing each section I worked on. I always made sure the save dialog came up and worked.

What happened to my "manual" saves from today - any chance at recovering my work?

I figured no big deal at first, I'll just recover one of my earlier saves from today via Time Machine. Low and behold, the time stamp (last save?) in all of my TM backups is yesterday at 5:28pm on the Project.db file.

I am working from a Mac and the only place I can project files is /library/.../Resolve Disk Database/Resolve/Projects/Users/guest/Projects/{name of my project}/Project.db

Project.db contains the same timestamp in all of my TM snapshots today.

Since DR uses a database, perhaps I am looking in the wrong place to recover one of my earlier saves today.

Am I looking in the right place or is there another "hidden" area?

I tried to find the application, DaVinci Resolve Project Server, mentioned in the manual. I was hoping to poke around the database that way. I am guessing that is a Studio version only geared toward teams.

As far as future work goes, it looks like I need to setup the "Project Backup" function which appears to be more of an automatic save feature. I had been doing daily project archives to an external disk as my "backup" procedure.

Besides setting up Project Backups, is there some other process I need to incorporate into my workflow so I don't lose work again in the future?

Preferences>User>Project Save and Load>Save Settings>Live Save

Turn it on.

Thanks.

I thought I had turned that on after the last crash, but I just checked and it is not.

It still doesn't explain why hitting "Project Save" didn't also save the work.

Live and learn.

I'll have Live Save and Project Backups running. Hopefully this doesn't happen again.

I would also suggest exporting a manual backup once a day, particularly for long-running projects. Just stick the file on a thumbdrive or any removable drive, so it's there if you need it.

Live Save and Backups are thoroughly explained in the manual, and it's required reading. I would agree that I wish that Live Save was on by default.

If you want to test manual save, hit ^S and then look at the Project Database screen. The open project listing should now have a "Last Modified" date and time of today, in the last minute. If it doesn't you definitely have a problem.