I've been working on a project, and saving regularly. I had a crash, during which I tried to save. However post-crash, now when I try to open my project, I simply get an error about an "invalid project file". So, I guess I'm curious if A:M stores previous saves anywhere in a hidden way so I could go find a previous version? I have been simply doing a "save", not "save as", however I'm just wondering of any way to get any previous version back. Or am I simply, utterly, hopelessly screwed?

This only started happening to me in v12. Don't know what causes it. Every time I try to reproduce the error, the model/project file saves beautifully :-/ Since you got an "invalid project file" message instead of a "could not load model" message, I'm assuming all your models are embedded in the project? I think the model or chor you were working on before the crash is the culprit. You already know this, but I'l repeat it anyway because I get lazy sometimes too - You can minimize the damage by saving in versions(project v1, project v2, model v1, model v2, material v1, material v2, etc).

You can probably open a copy of your corrupted project file in a text editor and get the items that got saved before the crash, but I'm guessing AM just stopped saving when it hit the snag that caused the crash.

It would help if you open the file in an editor that lets you know what line number you're on. Do a search for [MODELFILE] and make a note what line it's on. Then do a search for [ENDMODELFILE] and select everything between these two tags (including the tags). Copy and paste each model into a seperate text file and name the text file with an .mdl extension, so the file name looks like MyModel.mdl. Try opening it up in in AM and see if ti loads. That's the only thing I can think of.

You've probably lost the model file that caused the crash unless you can send it to Hash and hope maybe they can fix it.

Hey - now that's a detailed answer! 5 gold stars for that one! I've already begun reconstructing the project from a version I did save 2 days ago - and I think re-building will be alot faster than trying to salvage the old file. But, thank you for your excellent response.