Okay, so I have this sculpt I've been working on.  A few hours every day after work.

Today I go to load it and I get this:

Am I completely hosed?  Is my hard work gone for good?

In all my memory, I don't recall any way to survive this.  I only recall it occurring in situations that resulted poorly.

I myself have never rescued a file from this condition.  That's why I save a new file version of whatever I'm working on about every three hours.

I just did some searching and I found this:

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=169070

And, it worked for me!

Apparently, the error can come from saving on exit as opposed to saving, then exiting.  If you add a dot z (example: file.car.z) to your file name, then open the file with something like 7-Zip (I used Winrar) it will inflate the file and then you can open that file.

It worked for me.  Hopefully anyone else who runs into problem will be able to find this little trick useful.

Literally saved me days of work.

@ Kixum.  Yeah, the multiple save thing is a good work habit.  I know better, but my older version was actually days old since I had neglected good practice for so long.

Yes all files from Carrara (presets, scenes) are saved as a zip or something like that. The good idea is to always save uncompressed to avoid this kind of error message.

First, I'm super glad that you got your file back (rock on!).

Second, I always find it weird when problems like this are known but they don't be fixed.

Glad there was a solution.