Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

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  • Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

    Apparently it's a known issue that Final Draft is prone to file corruption. I had no idea, and want to share my harrowing experience.

    I was working to a crazy deadline, writing a feature-length script in three weeks. I set a goal to finish the first draft in two weeks and take a week for the rewrite and polish.

    Ten days in, I was right on schedule with 78 pages. I wrote 7 pages and moved a couple of scenes around based on what I'd written. I had to stop for a while and closed Final Draft so my daughter wouldn't add her own contributions (she's 2).

    I was back in ten minutes and opened Final Draft--and got an error. "Unexpected File Format". I tried again, but no luck. Heart racing, I tried to open another script. No problem. Back to my current one, got the error.

    Desperate, I searched online for solutions to this nerve-wracking problem and discovered how unreliable Final Draft's saved files are, a problem which persists in version 8. All I could do was wonder why it's the industry standard when it's prone to corrupt files.

    Thankfully, I also came across Final Draft's automatic backup feature. It seems the makers of FD are aware of the issue and built in an automatic backup every 15 minutes. All I had to do was find the folder where the backups are saved and open the last one.

    I found the files and tried the last backup, but it was corrupt. The second-to-last file, also corrupt. The third-to-last file loaded just fine.

    I'd lost everything I'd done so far that day, but the rest of the script was intact. Needless to say, I was done writing for the day. I managed to churn out the last pages, rewrite and polish, and deliver the script on time, but I made additional backups every hour just to be sure.

    If you encounter this error, don't panic. Restore a backup file. Best to have multiple backups, preferably in multiple places. Even hard copies or PDF files are better than losing your script.
    Vancouver Screenwriters Meetup Group

  • #2
    Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

    My condolences.

    You don't say if you're using Windows or a Mac. I'm on Windows 7. (The following problems - I've also had them on my XP machine.)

    Yes, FD can screw up files. To date - knock wood - I've not had the problem you had. Instead, I've had FD files corrupt themselves while they are open and I'm editing them. A chunk of pages disappears somewhere between the location I just edited and the end. So for example: I edit something on page 22 and SUDDENLY my 105-page doc becomes an 82-page doc. (And UNDO doesn't fix it.)

    My hunch is that it has something to do with the background re-pagination process. I find it's most likely to happen if I am editing a page and that causes a single chunk of dialogue or action to be split - i.e., broken between the current page and the prior or next page - by whatever algorithm FD uses.

    So, I try to practice Safe FDing - I do a Save at regular intervals as I edit. And - I do iterations with "Save As" - myscipt_v1-0.fdx; myscript_v1-1.fdx

    I do a new Save As especially when I see that an edit might cause that sort of page-jumping/splitting by FD. Or I see that it just happened. Or if I am about to cut & paste a chunk of text.

    Beyond the fact that this shouldn't happen with FD... IMO, here is the big deficiency with FD's "auto backup" process:

    With regular word-processing software, if you set it to do regular backup saves (e.g., every 5 minutes), it does that without saving the ACTUAL file you are working on. I mean, it saves the substance of it, but does not literally "Save" that file. Instead, it creates a safety-save version with some hybrid suffix - e.g., if FD did it that way, a background backup might be: "myscript_v1-1.fdq" This sorta word-processing software feature has been around since at least the mid-90s.

    OTOH, FD seems to just do this: Whenever you do Save your file in one folder, it makes a copy of it in some other folder. Big whoop-di-do! And as your experience suggests, if your last-saved copy is corrupt, then that so-called "backup" copy - being just a copy - is corrupt as well.

    The only benefit I can see from the way FD does its backups: If you manually set that backup folder to a location on some other hard drive, then if your main drive crashes, you have a backup. Otherwise? I don't see a benefit.

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    • #3
      Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

      Old FD files (.fdr) used to go corrupt all the time. .fdx is better, but apparently still susceptible. Since it's XML, have you tried opening the corrupt file in another program that can read fdx files? or even just a text editor to see if you can extract data?

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

        I've never had a happen, but I would try opening the corrupt file in a text editor (Notepad on Windows) to recover any material I would have lost.

        There is a good chance that the problem is in the header of the file. If you compare the header of the corrupt file to the header of a working file, you may be able to repair the corrupt file and recover your latest version.

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        • #5
          Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

          I dunno about any of you, but when I looked at an FD file in Windows Notepad - It was an impractical mess. At least with my fdx files, it appears there is more code than text that I'd typed.

          But I was able to make some sense of it by opening some of my FD files in MS Word 2007 - both as fdx files and after I had saved them as txt files. (I assume this can also be done in the free software, OpenOffice.)

          So if this happens to you and if you have MS Word, but your corrupt FD file won't open in Word, you might try this:
          1. Open it in Notepad.
          2. Do a Save As into txt format.
          3. Take your most recent/previous/good FD file (before the corruption) - Open that in Notepad.
          4. Do a Save As of that file into txt format.
          5. Open one of those txt files in MS Word.
          6. Then use the file COMPARE function in Word and open the other txt file.
          7. Then (at least in Word 2007), switch the View to "Full Screen" - which takes away all of the xml/field codes.
          8. Then, you should be able to see the differences between those 2 txt files - i.e., see the changes you had made that now aren't viewable in FD. (It's not pretty, but I was able to spot the differences easily when I did a test.)
          On the other hand, if your corrupt FD file will open directly in Word, do the basics of those same steps to find the changes, one fdx file to the other.

          Good luck.
          Last edited by Manchester; 08-30-2012, 03:26 PM.

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          • #6
            Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

            For what it's worth, if this happens again to anyone, I'd be happy to take a look at it. Fade In does import Final Draft (.fdx), and it does a pretty good job of it. And because the importer code is all written from scratch it might (might) be able to parse something that Final Draft itself deems corrupt.

            And if not, I'd like to potentially be able to relax the fallback parsing of .fdx to help people in exactly this sort of situation.

            (The free downloadable demo of Fade In can import .fdx.)

            Comment


            • #7
              Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

              If it's .fdx I'll be happy to look at it too. Unless there is something impossibly bad about it, it should be extremely recoverable with anyone who knows their way around XML files. Not that a user should ever have to do that - but it shouldn't be a panic situation...

              Good luck,

              Mac
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              • #8
                Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

                First, always take a deep breath instead of panicking when a file becomes corrupt.

                It is almost never as bad as it seems. You can usually get the text back with some work.

                By the way, the free screenwriting program Trelby can open an .fdx (Final Draft 8) file and even save in .fdx format. I wish that the original poster would download Trelby and try opening the corrupt file in it, just to see if it works.

                It also never hurts to do the following when you are pouring out those golden words that you know you could never reproduce:

                Make a simple copy-and-paste text document. In Windows, use Ctrl+A to select all the text in the FD document; then Ctrl+C to copy it all; then paste it into a real text editor (not Notepad) or into Word. You get an unformatted file, which looks like:

                FADE IN:
                INT. PASTOR'S HOME - DAY
                The PASTOR is at his desk, writing with an old-fashioned pen. Every once in a while he dips it into an inkwell.
                A KNOCK sounds at the door.
                The PASTOR goes to the door and opens it.
                A man in his thirties, dressed in the clothes of a bum, stands in the doorway.
                YOUNG MAN
                (hesitantly)
                I was wondering, sir, if you are Pastor Miller? They told me to come to talk to you.
                PASTOR
                Who did, if I may ask?
                YOUNG MAN
                A man at the edge of town.
                PASTOR
                I am Pastor Miller. How may I help you?
                YOUNG MAN
                I'm looking for a job.


                This will be a lifesaver when you just want to retrieve your words.

                Why not Notepad? If you are using Windows 7 and Notepad, try pasting text from Final Draft into Notepad. My experience is that you get one long paragraph of text. No line breaks.

                Instead, use Notepad++ or PSPad, both of which are 100% free. They will include the line breaks, as in my example above.

                "The fact that you have seen professionals write poorly is no reason for you to imitate them." - ComicBent.

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                • #9
                  Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

                  My system crashed. Before the crash I was working on a version of my screenplay. NO I am not able to open. everytime I do it gives me a message file not compatible. I have been working on this draft for last 10 days. I can open the older drafts but not this.
                  I tried using trelby even it is not able to open it. Please HELP....

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                  • #10
                    Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

                    Send the file to me, and I will see if I can open it.

                    If I cannot, I will send it to Kent Tessman, who is a wonderful programmer (Fade In), and see if he can fix it for you.

                    Send it to:

                    [email protected]

                    "The fact that you have seen professionals write poorly is no reason for you to imitate them." - ComicBent.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

                      So I guess you worked it out, huh? I hope that you did.

                      Anyway, if you still have the problem but do not want to send the file, try downloading the demo of Fade In and using it to import the file.

                      If the Fade In demo does not let you export back to Final Draft .fdx, I can do it for you, since I have the registered version of Fade In.

                      "The fact that you have seen professionals write poorly is no reason for you to imitate them." - ComicBent.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

                        Update to previous comments

                        In the last six weeks I have received three Final Draft .fdx files from people who found that their .fdx files were corrupt and would not open. At least two of these people had already checked with Final Draft. They reported to me that Final Draft had said that nothing could be done.

                        I tried everything that I could. I tried importing into Fade In. I tried opening in a professional text editor (Notepad++) just to see what was there.

                        Nothing worked. Opening in a text editor ought to yield text that looks a lot like HTML code. Instead, I got nothing but NUL NUL NUL in line after line.

                        All three files were exactly alike in this respect. Just NUL NUL NUL.

                        I also sent the third file to Kent Tessman, the developer of Fade In. He looked at the file and said that he could not get anything out of it.

                        Two of the three people told me that their automatic backup folder had nothing helpful. One of them told me that everything was corrupt or that nothing was there (it was not clear to me just which). The third person told me that her backup folder, with its default of 50 files, had become full and had no backups of her recent file. The folder only had some really old files. This did not make any sense.

                        According to the Final Draft documentation, which I checked last night, the older files are supposed to be purged as new ones are added.
                        You can set ... the number of backups stored in the folder before the older backups are purged.
                        The wording is a little vague, but I checked my own automatic backup folder (I use a default of 10), and I had 10 files from the last few days, from the script that I was helping someone with, which he had sent in Final Draft format. And I never purge those files manually, so they are obviously supposed to roll off into oblivion when newer files come into the folder.

                        It would appear that the automatic backup failed, at least in the case of the third person with a corrupt file. She had also just installed Windows 10, and it rebooted while she was working (as I understood the matter).

                        Bottom line here:

                        1. If your Final Draft .fdx file will not open, and you get NUL NUL NUL when you look at it with a text editor, I cannot help. I wish I could, but I cannot.

                        2. Consider some backups in addition to the automatic backup folder. Of course, you should be doing that anyway, because the hard disk may fail.

                        "The fact that you have seen professionals write poorly is no reason for you to imitate them." - ComicBent.

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                        • #13
                          Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

                          Thank you so much Rene C -- 7 years later
                          "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
                          -Maya Angelou

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                          • #14
                            Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

                            i, too, have had this problem on older versions-- FD7 & FD8. usually i was able to recover files in the archives.

                            since then, i "save as" whenever i am at a stopping/pause point. it's inconvenient, but better than having the fear of crashing. i save file versions by date.

                            i am working on macs. i will say that since i switched to a mac (years ago) i have not really had this problem so much.

                            recently, i lost power a couple of times or i had the program lock up my entire computer and have had to reboot the hard way-- the on/off button. yikes!

                            but so far, it's always recovered the version with my most current, up to the second changes. i have autosave on constantly.
                            "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy b/c you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." -- Edward Snowden

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                            • #15
                              Re: Final Draft 8 corrupt file - don't panic?

                              Originally posted by finalact4 View Post
                              i, too, have had this problem on older versions-- FD7 & FD8. usually i was able to recover files in the archives. ...
                              Does Final Draft allow exporting to Fountain now? If it does, I would definitely add that to your backup procedure. Text files will never go out of style.
                              STANDARD DISCLAIMER: I'm a wannabe, take whatever I write with a huge grain of salt.

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