So, I've had around 10 corrupt Reaper projects in the last few days.

They are in Reaper 5 brought in from 4.78. Either incomplete with missing header and some nonsense or Chinese characters with empty bak file. Getting a little nervous as I have never had a project file in any other DAW that I just couldn't open one way or the other (other than Cakewalk bundles, but those just sucked and they don't count).

I have run across at least 2 that con't be fixed or redone. I guess I expected too much for $60.

There is an article in this month's SOS discussing solutions to this problem.

It isn't SOS' software or problem really. If I could spend $1 to get it sorted, it would be a deal, but there is no guarantee that it will. For the record, the drive checks good and the files were moved, but it appears they were bad before the last back up and drive switch.

"Sound on Sound" magazine published the article; I don't think it's their problem though. <edit> Didn't mean to cross-post you Schwa my man.

Last time that happened to me was with Logic 7 in 200X. I THINK the problem was that I recorded to a FAT formated external drive.

Please send a sample to schwa as requested since he is asking so he can review. In the meantime consider anything else the could have possibly corrupted them, AV, etc. whatever. They typically can't corrupt themselves so it would be a good time to check things may not on the surface appear to be related while he reviews on his end. EDIT: didn't see your post above when I posted, sorry. Nevertheless you should provide schwa the entire .bak file. Since some data is encoded/compressed it will look strange in a project or bak file.

It would be very helpful if we could have one of the corrupted files, and ideally a non-corrupted version of the same project. In the excerpt above, the project file begins in the middle of a state save for a plugin. In other words, the project file was wiped in the middle of saving the state for that plugin. By any chance can you tell which plugin by looking at the file, and knowing what the original project looked like? Is there any chance of an out-of-memory error occurring while saving these projects?

Yep, possible hard drive corruption indeed.

Just spitballing here, but wouldn't it make more sense to save any data to a new hidden file, and then once it's totally complete and double verified, only then would it be swapped into the main save file? For instance: - Original file is mysong.rpp - User hits save - Reaper writes project data to newSave.mysong.rpp - Reaper verifies that newSave.mysong.rpp matches project stored in RAM - Reaper deletes mysong.rpp, then renames newSave.mysong.rpp --> mysong.rpp It sounds like a huge unnecessary hassle, but I'm a guy in love with redundancy when it makes things more stable. Just my 2 cents