I've had Bryce 5.0 for about 6 weeks and so am really new to the program. I've been working on scene with a cottage for about a week. Yesterday I opened the file and found that about 3 or 4 sessions of work was lost. Previously I'd completed the stone walls, a roof, a door and three windows with shutters, but yesterday all I found were the walls and part of the roof. AFter some wailing and gnashing of teeth, I buckled down and redid everything, but I'm wondering what the heck happened. Admittedly, I might not have saved the file after the last time I worked on it, although I don't think so, because Bryce makes it hard, if not impossible, to forget. Since my last work was only doing the shutters on the final window, where did all the rest of it go? Obviously I saved all the previous times, or the door and the other two windows wouldn't have been there when I opened the file to work on the last window. All I find in the manual is the instructions on how to save a file (pg 25). From now on I will use Save As to make another file as a backup, but my big question is, What in the world did I do to lose so much work? Any thoughts?

Did you maybe save the file to different location on your HD? I've done that on a couple occassions... Leaves you with two copies. One has the recent work and one doesn't.

Could you have used the Revert to Save option, this discards any changes made since the last save. Sound like this command was used or Bryce goofed and used it instead.

Make sure Bryce has finished saving before going on to another operation. Also, don't run other apps when rendering or saving. I lost 3 major piecs in the last week because of his. What I mean is....don't be tempted to play spider patience while waiting for a render to finish.

I've never had this happen except once. On a windoze ME crash, I had nothing in a file because the crash occurred during the save. Not knowing at the time that bryce saves in a temp file as well, I went to the restore point and was able to bring back an earlier version of my file. If you had winME and it auto reverted, that could cause it. Also,if after your last save, you made changes, or deleted things, what Stephen Ray makes sense. What Cshaftoe says was similar to my experience. If you had no other glitches, then your thought that you didn't save makes sense, however, bryce does ask before you exit. Best wishes to you. Its not a bug that I know of. You might want to make sure you have the patch which is availabe at www.corel.com cuz it does fix a lot of bugs.

If you want to be sure, save to a new name(make sure of the directory, (as per cobalt), just before you render. Then if it corrupts somehow you have the original and the modified version. Bryce and Poser are always doing wierd things to me so I keep having to remind myself to be careful.

Thanks, everyone. Your thoughts and suggestions much appreciated. I'm going to save this page!

This reminded me of something, for about three months, I couldn't save anything in Bryce 5 after the first save. If I saved the file, then made changes and saved it, only up to the first save would be there. I ended up having to make changes, save the file under a new name, make changes, save under a new name, etc., etc., and so forth until I was done. It was a pain, but it worked. This was on WinME. As soon as I upgraded to WinXP Pro, the problem disappeared. -darlisa

Darlisa: I run win ME and have never had that prob. I did have a session where B5.01 saved TWICE when I tried to just save it.

Well, I was having all kinds of problems with ME, with constant system and dll crashes, so there is no telling what was going on. -darlisa