Working on a big project, which I backed up to an external drive. Today when I try to open my file, I get a "file not found" error. What do I do?

? Plug in the external drive, do MoI file open, and browse for the file ?

- Brian
Sometimes I use a USB stick.

Hi rookie,

> Working on a big project, which I backed up to an external drive. Today when
> I try to open my file, I get a "file not found" error. What do I do?

Are you able to locate the file using the regular operating system file browsing stuff?

Did you maybe "Move" the file to the external drive, rather than just make a copy of it to the external drive? If so then it's on your external drive now so like Brian says above plug that in and look on it.

- Michael

I should have said that both the file on my hard drive and the backed up server file have the same error. "File not found". Not all files on this project are having that error. Seems rather random.

Is this a PC or a Mac?

When I unplug my USB drive, the files saved to it in MoI no longer appear in the MoI file open dialog.

Sometimes using windows library, and dragging a file to the USB drive, from the C drive, the result is a "shortcut" on the USB drive, rather than an actual copy.
So trying to open the shortcut on another computer does not work.

- Brian

Hi rookie,

> I should have said that both the file on my hard drive and the backed up server
> file have the same error. "File not found". Not all files on this project are having
> that error. Seems rather random.

Could you give some more details about what steps you are going through when seeing this error? Is it when you are doing a "File > Open" and you're in the system dialog box? Are you on Mac or Windows?

I don't think that MoI itself puts up any error message like that, it may be something that the operating system is doing... Can you show a screenshot of the error message? That may help me to recognize whether it is even coming directly from MoI or not.

Do you have any sort of unusual characters in the file names themselves?

- Michael

? Are the files stored under a different User name? (Windows 7)

And this random problem persists. For a while it wasn't happening, but today I can't seem to open anything after I just created it! Here is the error message. Rather "generic".

Strange.... Are you trying to open the file by using the File > Open menu button inside of MoI or are you doing it by some other means like drag-and-drop ?

- Michael

If you're trying drag/drop, instead try launching MoI first and then use File > Open.

Maybe there is some problem with the drag/drop handling specifically on the older 10.6 operating system.

- Michael

Also do you have any punctuation or non-english language characters in the file name or directory?

It's possible that file paths with some particular punctuation characters like * in them (which are disallowed in Windows file names) may be causing a problem with drag/drop handling.

- Michael

I know this "rookie". She was dragging and dropping to open files. She didn't notice the "File Open" in the lower left hand corner (he-he). I think opening them from the file menu will solve the problem.

Hi Michael C - drag and drop is supposed to work though, but in v2.5 if I remember right there was a problem when certain characters where in the file name or directory path, like * or / characters.

But this is supposed to be fixed in v3 - if it's not fixed and you can figure out which particular characters are causing the problem please let me know so I can try to reproduce the problem over here and get it fixed up.

The handling of drag/drop is quite a bit more complicated (with more layers between MoI and the operating system handling various things) than the File > Open menu so it's pretty likely that the file menu will not have the problem.

- Michael