Corrupt autobak's (max)

boebi

So this is an issue that has been annoying me for the past year already.

For some reason, over half my autobak files are always corrupt!

I have been using max 2010 and now 2012 and I still have the problem. There are some issues with my laptop which causes it to crash now and then.

So right now I am making 60 autobak files with a 2 minute interval.

Whenever I get a crash or I made a mistake and want to revert back to an autobak, I usually have to go through at least 15 corrupt files, usually around 25!
Then I get a couple (around 3-6) files that actually work and then I get a couple corrupt ones again, then I get another 10 corrupt ones in a row, etc etc
It seems to be pretty random.

But this seems really strange to me, has anyone ever had this problem and/or knows a solution?

I use max 2012 with SP1 and SP2 installed.

Thanks

Xoliul

Can't really help much, other than say it really isn't this bad for me. Max barely ever crashes, if It ever does I can even try to avoid it happening. I only get those corrupt Autobak files (sometimes) if my computer actually froze up and bluescreened, which has not happened the past year or two.

I remember a few cases where it was much worse, one specifically was where I worked with meshes from old max files (max 9 files), I changed them from high to lowpoly versions and there was a lot of messy, sloppy geometry: double verts, random polygons that shouldn't be there. That was one of the worst cases, it tended to crash and corrupt things a lot. So perhaps it's tied to working neatly in a way?

Edit: come to think, it was always worse on my slower laptops. My desktop is much faster and never had much issues..

Mark Dygert

I don't have the same issues that I once had. It used to be as bad as you have it but that was 2-3 years ago and since then I've upgrade desktops at work and at home, I'm running 64bit win7 and there have been several updates to max. It seems like the buggiest it ever got was on 32bit XP with low ram 4mb and 3dsmax2010, it was a constant crash/corrupt fest.

Now the only time I get corrupt files is if I go to close, haven't saved and it prompts to save. If I save it by clicking "yes" and then it closes it almost always corrupts. So I say no, save and close.

During those crashing often days it seemed that autoback files would always corrupt in some way even if I could open them they would lead to a crash sooner or later. So I bound "save incremental" (abc01.max -> abc02.max ect...) to ctrl-s and would rack up 20-30 files over the course of a few hours of work sometimes I would get corrupt batches if I worked for too long without restarting max, but there would normally be something I could use that was recent enough. But avoiding autoback files seemed to help stability and corruption quite a bit.

I'm not really sure what solved it, but I think it was probably the jump to 64bit, more ram and more stable versions of max.

boebi

Well I already use 64bit and have 8 gigs of ram so I doubt that that is the problem. I actually also bound ctrl+s to save incrementally which does help a lot. Still it sometimes happens that I forget to save for half an hour and if the laptop then crashes its very annoying if the backups dont help and I have to redo it.

This doesnt sound too bad but imagine this happening like 20 to 30 times in the same project...

Xoliul

I think it's not just ram, might just be a not so awesome laptop. It's probably a combination of everything: slower CPU, slower HD (and no SSD), in general lesser hardware compared to a desktop.
Same at work really, nobody complains about Max crashing often, everybody has decent desktop computers.

Ace-Angel

Scan your HDD for any corruption and/or damage. It could be your HDD is having read/write issues, which happens with extremely stressed and dated HDD.

boebi

The harddrive is in perfect condition and has recently been replaced, before that I had an intel x25 SSD which gave me the same issues. As cpu im running an i7-720 and for graphics dual gtx285m in sli. Last month the motherboard, cpu, ram and graphics cards were replaced. And I still have the same issues so I really doubt its the hardware.

I should actually check if I have the same problem on my desktop, havent done that yet.

Xoliul

I'm a bit confused, you have a desktop, and a laptop, which one is giving you issues ?

mLichy

Yeah, bad Hard drives for 1 will do it. Or drives that are going out.

Also I think having super high poly scenes might run the risk as well. But thats prob bs. ha

boebi

It's the laptop giving me issues, it now and then crashes and my autobaks are mostly corrupt. I only just had a crash and I was really lucky to see that my 2nd most recent autobak worked!

As I said, I had windows installed on an SSD and a harddrive now, both give me same issues which really lead me to believe its a max issue... I've tried to do some googling but didn't really find anything which really surprised and confused me, which then leads me to believe its a hardware issue...

Basically I'm lost now, heh..


EDIT: It happens to both low and high poly scenes. The harddrive looks like its in 100% perfect health as I've ran pretty much any diagnostic I could find on it (Seagate Tools aka SeaTools, Hdtune, etc)