Photoshop Crashed, now my map is corrupt - any way to recover?

[Ascension]

I'll add my condolences as well, happened to me a few times. You put so much work into something and then it poofs and it sucks more if it's your personal pet project or world. I tried every product on the market for psd recovery (and the Gimp) and none of them worked so I feel your pain and desperation.

[DevinNight]

As far as saving copies, remember you don't have to be in PS to make copies, just make a copy to a new directory, that shouldn't take any time at all, then just give it a new name. In PS I make a new file about every day I work for more than a couple hours on a file. I lost a whole summer of stuff once when my hard drive crashed, since then I do daily backups to two different drives, and rotate a third drive in once a month, that drive is then hidden in the house somewhere out of sight.

This is a last ditch effort and not sure it would work on a PC, but you might try putting a .PDF extension on your PS file. I've managed to salvage a corrupted file that way, but I was on my Mac at the time. Sorry about the loss... I know it hurts.

[Redrobes]

Im with Devin here. I have two internal HDDs in my PC and the second is an XCopy mirror of all files in first HDD done now and again - like every day or two. Then about every few weeks to about a month or so I plug in a USB HDD and do the same XCopy to that and let it chunder, then it gets unplugged and stored. I have several of these USB HDDs - actually its one USB caddy and several raw drives with no casing cos its a lot cheaper. About once a year I take one of the drives and swap it with an off site version of it.

I also save all my maps, files and everything that I put a lot of work into as save1.png, save2.png etc as I go. I don't overwrite the last one EVER ! If I need more space I delete 1,2,3 in order leaving at least a few between the starting ones and my latest.

For those interested, make a BAT file out of something like a list of these:

xcopy C:\MyImportantStuffDir\*.* D:\MyImportantStuffDir /K /O /X /E /Y /D /C /R /F /H

and then its just a double click to backup everything thats important to you. It costs nothing but HDD space and thats cheap these days. Certainly cheaper then my time to redo it !

[RjBeals]

Thanks for the advice guys. I guess I'm part of that club now. Nothing could be done to save the file, but I've already started over - and I've come to grips with that now. ha.. it's like I lost a loved one almost. But I will most definitely save and save again more often, and backup. The good news is that I had the region borders, highways and secondary roads all created in illustrator, so I had that as a starting point (again). It at least gives me a base. I had a lot of reference pictures i had found on the internet pasted in the ps file though, that I'll have to look for again. But ah well. I'll probably start a WIP thread here also - just to give me a reason to post some jpegs.

[ravells]

I'm surprised that photoshop doesn't have an incremental save option. It would be so easy to do, so everytime you hit ctrl-S (in windows), it would save a new copy rather than overwrite the one you're working on.

Ohhh look what I just found as freeware: http://www.creativecrash.com/downloa...ve-photoshopcs

and here: http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?...ewtopic&t=6337

[ravells]

I've downloaded and installed this one (costs 5 Euros): http://autosave.cz/en/about-autosave.html

This one does an incremental autosave (you can set how often you want it to save and how many increments you want it to have before it overwrites the _01 file) and it will save to a second directory at the same time if you want it to.

I had some problems getting it to work and the guy who wrote it was very quick at replying. We traced the problem down to the fact that I have both the 32 bit and 64 bit version of photoshop installed (I use the 32 bit most because it supports the 3rd party filters I use). It will work only with the 64 bit version unless I uninstall it and then it will work with the 32 bit version....I'm a bit loath to uninstall the 64 bit version if I don't have to. I've renamed the 64bit .exe extension to disable it.

My verdict: This works well if you are running only one version of photoshop. Bit of a pain but doable if you are running two versions of photoshop (you will need to disable one as above or uninstall it).