Help Recovering A Render-To-Disc Project

[Sockratease]

I hope I have not ruined my project!

My "Good" computer is having some problems and needs to go into a repair shop as I am not very good at such things.

I do a lot of work for some of the naughtier websites out there and felt it may be a good idea to hide / password protect many of folders and drives before it goes into a stranger's hands, so I got a program which does that and hid a bunch of stuff.

Just to test things before it went into the shop, I opened UF and my Render To Disc project was gone.

I didn't delete anything, so I just unlocked all my hidden stuffs and tried again, but the project is still not showing.  It was running for a couple months and if it is totally lost, I will be very upset with this program (again).

Please tell me there is a way to recover this thing!

And how to do so?

It was a high resolution deep zoom and was 20 something percent done - but since I run my zooms backward so they speed up towards the end rather than slow down  (for purely psychological reasons)  (it makes the waiting much less stressful) this was the bulk of the render time.  It was finally starting to speed up, and now I fear I lost a ton of effort.

This is why I really wish UF would just render images as they complete for such things.  Waiting until the end to give even one image in such a big project is UltraFractal's biggest flaw, and the main reason I don't use it much.

If this is lost forever...

WOOF!

So, does anybody have any ideas about what I should do next?  Besides cry?   

[Sockratease]

OK, so I found the "Restore Job" command.

Does anybody know if this is the thingy to use?

I am afraid to test it in fear of it overwriting wherever it kept the partially done data and need to start from the beginning again. 

Will using this tell it to pick up where I left off?  That's a lot of data to lose...

Plus, if I can't get the computer fixed on my budget - is there a way to move this to another computer and let it run there without having to start over?

Oy...

I may have to write to Freddy Unpronounceable on that one...   

[cKleinhuis]

dude best luck on this, what is the restore job command a built in feature of ultrafractal ... it never came crossing my pathes ...

[Sockratease]

I found the Restore Job command by right clicking the render job tab's "add" button.  It brings up a context menu with a few options, but that one sounds like what I want.

I think I'll start a new animation, abort it after a while, remove it, then try this and see where it re-starts...

I was just hoping somebody else had experience in case there is a better way - I'd hate to lose all the calculations so far  

[JohnVV]

I take it this is a MS windows OS used ?

if a Linux os ( i use  RHEL6, and family of OS's )
"extundelete" supports the newish ext4 partitions

it has been a VERY long time since i had to recover anything on a NTFS partition 

well most likely the "folder" was moved someplace after " securing" it
then the original was deleted

unless you stopped right then and there and did not even power off and DID NOT even type one  letter

the partition table  will be able to be used

but if this box is still in use
the deleted file is 99% likely gone


personally to "lock" a folder i would use the 7z archive format and put a password on it and use the encryption option in archiving it
and use " Debian's " program "srm"
or the standard on almost all Nix os's ( builds in windows too) " shred"   
to remove the original folder

or
PGP
 

[Sockratease]

I take it this is a MS windows OS used ?

if a Linux os ( i use  RHEL6, and family of OS's )
"extundelete" supports the newish ext4 partitions

it has been a VERY long time since i had to recover anything on a NTFS partition 

well most likely the "folder" was moved someplace after " securing" it
then the original was deleted

unless you stopped right then and there and did not even power off and DID NOT even type one  letter

the partition table  will be able to be used

but if this box is still in use
the deleted file is 99% likely gone


personally to "lock" a folder i would use the 7z archive format and put a password on it and use the encryption option in archiving it
and use " Debian's " program "srm"
or the standard on almost all Nix os's ( builds in windows too) " shred"   
to remove the original folder

or
PGP
 

Hi and thanks for the advice.

I doubt anything was actually deleted, just removed from a list.

The problem is UF pretending that the in-progress data location is a secret!  Freddy Baby and I have had this discussion before, and I was assured that "one day" he would fix this so that images could be produced as the render process is going on  (like every other animation program in the entire world - from 3D Software to Graphing Programs to anything else one can think of which renders image sequences!).

I have not had a chance to try my experiment aborting and removing a sequence, then trying the restore job thingy.

That's on today's list of things to do...

I hope I can get to it!  Gotta go to my day job shortly, so it'll be a while - but that seems the next logical step.

[Sockratease]

Well...

The restore Job command is for restoring a project specifically backed up for later restoration.

In other words, useless.

I swear I don't see why people love this program so much - it is not geared for professional use at all.  In fact, this is not the first time I have had issues with it's refusal to output images as they are ready.  It was for different reasons before, but this time - I am Officially a member of The WE HATE ULTRA FRACTAL CLUB!!

Freddy - your program is so poorly conceived for rendering animations - I will start actively discouraging anybody who asks from even trying it.

What a waste.

I never even removed this job from the list - UF did that all by itself when it could not find the source file.  I tried to just close it and restore the source, but it though it knew better than me and removed it without permission.

If there is a way to recover the work in progress - I will apologize publicly.

Otherwise, I am outraged by the way this program treats large animation efforts.

Completely unsuitable and desperately in need of a fix  (like I was promised 2 years ago!!).