Corrupt File Issue

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone, over the last couple days I have made several models for an upcoming project.  The program ran smoothly with these models and everything went great.  With the last model I made, I tried to add a texture to a simple rectangular prism which I had not done in the other projects.  As soon as I added the texture (Ocean Shader) the program crashed.  I assumed this was just a one-off error and I didn't look into the crash report, however when I tried to re-open my file, a blank "new scene" template showed up and the program froze.  After force-quitting I attempted to re-open it several times but no luck.  I tried copying the file and opening that one but that also did not work.  After determining that the file was corrupted I went to google, I have heard in classes in the past that sometimes corrupt files can be recovered.  I found a couple of forum posts with solutions but these did not work in my case.  I'd really like to know if there's anything I can do to recover any part of my file (though it had been saved before the first crash).  If it helps I'm on a 2015 mac, fully updated, running Maya 2017.  

Thanks so much

I have also attached the file in case it's helpful.

(edit: I should mention that the program froze every time I tried to open the file, it did not just display a new scene)

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous and welcome to the community!

Are you sure you worked in 2017? I tried to open it in 2017 and it wouldn't load however 2018 it did load but it was the same looping that won't show the actual scene.

I opened it up in notepad and I didn't see anything I could edit to save the file unfortunately but it looks like the issue was with a boolean function. Did you use booleans at all in your scene? Also, can you possibly share the older version of the file before this issue?

[Anonymous]

Ok you were right, it actually was Maya 2018, the program seems to have updated itself a while back?  I don't think I updated it.  I used the booleans function a lot in the scene so I don't know specifically where the issue was, but it's helpful to know it wasn't a texturing error.  Unfortunately because I've never encountered this before I don't have multiple back ups.  Do you think you could share the notepad text file or at least how to convert a .mb file to text after the fact?  Thanks so much for your help.

[sean.heasley · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous

You can actually open it as is on your machine. Simply right click on the file and select Open With->Notepad.

It's extremely important to manage your history especially when working with booleans so for future reference you'll want to make sure to remove history when you no longer need it and save in increments.

This should stop this type of issue from appearing in the future!

[pavelR.]

not sure why it is mentioned here to open a .mb file in a text-editor (.mb is a maya binary file) as the only other native format that would make sense to open in a text-editor is a .ma file (maya ascii file)... except if you like looking at a few human-readable string-values and a bunch of non-readable "ascii-art" 🙄

Storing files as .ma takes up more space and the save/load times are higher, but it is worth the effort because you can actually edit it's content and do some tweaking (like fixing the never fixed fbx-referencing BUG from type="FBX Export" to type="FBX".. I think the bug was mentioned in a 2015 post.. we have 2018..) (also.. afaik the 2GB file-size exceed bug was also only related to .mb files.. not a first-timer but certainly took a good time to release (again) a fix/update...).

however ..editing a large ascii file isn't as simple as editing a word file, especially because you can't delete blindly content.. and scrolling though a wall of history states and taking out one by one (or as bulks) is probably not worth the time.

Maybe AD could add..at least a warning... when the history-stack reaches a certain threshold and maybe add an option to auto-flush it after n-operations. It's not the first time a user loses his/her file due to the inability to open it again.

and while test-opening the file on a dual xeon with 256gb ram it just stayed at 714MB, it was hogging one core for a while but after half an hour there was literally no activity...(and also no memory allocation change!) couldn't this indicate an actual bigger issue ? (2gb file bug, the daily userprefs corruption, ...) I don't know.. maybe I am just looking at it from a developer perspective.. and granted.. I gave the file only one try, but I am also not a payed support representative...

EDIT: it was meant to be a reply to sean.heasley, and not to the OP, my bad.