EGP Project deleted on recover!

[BenjSmith]

I accidentally initiated a shutdown, but cancelled it as quickly as I could (Windows 7).  The one process that seemed to have been killed was my EGuide project.  When I opened Enterprise Guide (4.3), the standard recovery dialog appeared.  I selected "Open", then saved the file over my existing file (it was saved 10 minutes before).  However, a dialog appeared (sorry, I didn't save) and let me know that it couldn't open the project.  Furthermore, the project file was deleted.  The .egp no longer exists.

Is there any place I can look to recover this file?  I am ashamed to say how much work was lost.  Does SAS save its temporary files anywhere?  Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Ben

[ChrisHemedinger · Accepted solution]

You can scour your %TEMP% directory for SEG* folders, and perhaps find some remnants.

Also check:

%appdata%\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.3\ProjectRecovery

And if you have disk/folder backups, this is a good time to look into those...

If EG encountered a bad exception, it would appear in the Windows Event log in the Application section with a Source of SAS Enterprise Guide.  That might also provide some details about what went wrong.

Chris

[BenjSmith]

Chris, this was amazingly helpful.  Exactly what I needed.  I'll add detail for future reference.

Once I pulled the paper lunch sack from around my mouth, I checked the %appdata% folder (C:\Users\myname\AppData) and saw that there were a bunch of directories in ProjectRecovery.  Unfortunately, the most recent was several days ago.  I reached for the bag again.

Fortunately, when I looked in %TEMP%, there were more recent files.  I opened up a Command window (Windows button, type "CMD") and typed in %TEMP%.  This told me the location of that folder (C:\Users\myname\AppData\Local\Temp).  Surfing there, I did see a bunch of SEG1234 files that had wildly named folders in them: "d4abe1c686414b95a21f42e5d6532975", etc.  Each of these seems to have a file in it - some have a "code.sas" file, some have "results.txt".  I chose the one from this morning, and when I looked inside these folders, the "code.sas" files matched the most recent versions of my SAS programs.  My code was not lost, but my prompts did not seem to be in any of those folders, so I dreaded recreating 20-30 prompts.

On a whim I renamed the "tmp1234.tmp" file in the SEG1234 directory to "test.egp", it opened right up in EGuide, and there was the rehydrated project.  Prompts and everything.  I felt confident because the filesize was slightly larger than the older recovery file in ProjectRecovery, but was still happy when running that random temporary file through EGuide did no harm.

Good as new, bag's in the trash.  Thanks 1x10^6 for your help, hope someone else can use this in the future.

Ben

[ChrisHemedinger]

Ben,

Glad it helped.  Sorry you had to slog through a bit of the sausage to get there.

For important SAS program files, I like to store them on disk outside of the project.  It makes things easier for backup and also it's easier to manage the SAS files with other tools, use in multiple projects, etc.  You can reference the SAS programs from the project without embedding them in the project.

Some tips around that (whether you use source management or not):

Using source control management with SAS Enterprise Guide - The SAS Dummy

Chris

[Capt_VA_SAS]

Thank you Chris "Captain EG" Hemedinger and Ben Smith for this post.  It is still providing fruit 2 years later!

I was about to jump off the ledge until I read this and it worked!

[80sMetalForever]

This post was so incredibly helpful for recovering my own project, thank you Ben (& Chris) for taking the time to document your process to recover as it was basically the same for me. Ironic there was not one file in the ProjectRecovery area but yet the entire project is just hanging out in TEMP lol.

Chris - should this not be documented somewhere as a possible recovery solution? I had to do a very specific google search to land at this post and this was the only one that was helpful. Good point on storing programs outside of the project - I was thinking that while going through this ordeal. I've never seen a program get corrupted but have seen several projects.

"unable to open file" "as a valid project file" - search terms to hopefully point people to this thread.

[Ritz]

HI Chris,

Accidently i saved a SAS project over another EG project 😞

I use SAS EG 5.1 and have been trying to recover my original project since morning. I tried to recover it from %TEMP% but unfortunately in temp i have a very old copy saved (last week's) there is a folder for yesterday but it is empty with no rcv file.

I need to recover the latest file atleast from yesterday to be able to save my week's effort.

Is there a way to do that? Please suggest!!!
Thank You!