Project Recovery

Logic Buddy supports recovery of some types of project file corruption. Specifically, those types of issues that result in the error “The file couldn’t be opened because it isn’t in the correct format. The file might be corrupted, truncated, or in an unexpected format”.

Logic Buddy can find and recover these project files very quickly and easily and do this for all corrupted projects at once to make this process easier and faster than manually messing with project file internals.

This guide will take you through step by step how to perform project recovery in Logic Buddy.

  1. Verify monitored folders

    Logic Buddy will only search for corrupted projects in the folders that it monitors. You can adjust these in the Monitor tab in the Settings.

  2. Open Project Recovery

    On the top of the screen, go to the ‘Manage’ menu and select ‘Recover projects…’. This will show the Project Recovery window.

  3. Find Recoverable Projects

    Press the ‘Find Recoverable Projects’ button. This will search through the monitored projects folders and discover any project files which are corrupted which Logic Buddy is capable of recovering. When the search is complete, the Recoverable projects are show in the Recoverable Projects list. Note that this list only shows projects which Logic Buddy can recover; If it finds some corrupted project which it isn’t capable of recovering then it won’t appear in the list.

  4. Perform a backup (recommended)

    It is recommended to perform a backup of these project files before continuing just in case. Logic Buddy will make some changes to them to try and get them to open again which might result in data loss.

  5. Recover

    Select or deselect the projects which you want to recover and then press the ‘Recover’ button. This will then attempt to recover the project files so they can be opened once again in Logic Pro. If they succeed, they’ll show “(Recovered)” in the list next to the name to indicate that the recovery was a success.

  6. Try Opening

    Find and select the recovered project in Logic Buddy and open it. If it was recovered it should open right up in Logic Pro without errors and be usable again.

Troubleshooting

Why aren’t my corrupted project files showing up in the Project Recovery list?

This only happens for one of two reasons. Either that the project file is not in one of the monitored folders or Logic Buddy can’t recover the project.

Why are my Alternative names different then they used to be?

One type of project file corruption that Logic Buddy restores is missing meta data. This can include meta data that has the names of your project alternatives. If the project file is missing this information then Logic Buddy will generate new Alternative names that are just numbers after the project name. So you’ll have to change these in Logic Pro back to whatever they were before.

The recovered project isn’t exactly the same as it was before, why?

In some cases, a Logic Pro project file might be missing its project data. However, the developers at Apple have built in automatic backups which are generated since Logic Pro 10.1. If Logic Buddy finds a corrupted project which has backups but no primary project data then it’ll recover the project from one of the backups made by Logic Pro. If this happens then the project might not be exactly the same as it was when you last saved it but hopefully is at least better than total loss. If there was vital data that was not backed up by Logic Pro that was lost, then other file recovery software (like DiskDrill) could be of assistance.