Hi, new here, but using Prontos since 2000.

I have bought a TSU9400 in December and love it. I spent two weeks worth of evenings programming it to control my AV.

Today I wanted to change a few bits and to my horror and hours of search later, I discovered I have lost the xcf file.

I have also just emailed Philips, but I need to ask this: is there any way to recover the contents, even if that means going to a Philips service centre or shipping the remote somewhere to get its contents extracted? It was soooo simple in my 890...

Thanks, Luis

I don't think so. sorry.

Nope, if you lost the XCF, you are SOL.

This is terrible news for me.

I had just bought PadOne to try controlling a PC with MCE (I'm planning to build a HTPC for the AV room) and zilch, I'll have to rebuild my xcf completely! It'll take me another 2 weeks, I cannot believe this has happened... I control 8 AV devices with this xcf...

They could have protected the copyrighted contents just by using a password/encrypted system.

I am sorry for your loss but this topic is discussed for sure in the 9600 Editor Manual (F1 Help). What about the 9400?

Whenever I make major changes to my XCF, I start with a new version of my file, so in the event something goes wrong, I have the previous version to go back on. Anyway, I assume you already tried searching for the file in your recycle bin? If it's not there, did you try an undelete program that would try to recover the file (even if it's not in the recycle bin)? Of course, with undelete programs, they would only work if the sectors in your hard drive that contained your XCF haven't been overwritten yet. So, the less you use your PC and the sooner you try to undelete, the better the chance of recovery (and certainly don't do defrag or create lots of new files in the meantime).

I don't recall the name of the undelete program I used a few months back, but it saved me. I had accidentally deleted the My Pictures folder, and since I did it remotely from another PC, the data wasn't in the recycling bin. I quickly ran the undelete program to recover.

Thanks for the undelete help, but I have determined when I lost the file, it was on 19/01, when I last sync'd my laptop to my desktop, before going in a business trip for two weeks. The laptop had the various files and versions in Pronto Projects folder and the desktop didn't. I didn't remembered this small detail and just zapped it. My backups don't go that far back, so it's a total loss.

The only file I was left with was the conversion of my 890's ccf to xcf...

Even if I didn't have it, I could simply retrieve it from the 890.

This means all my learnt IR and manually input RC5 codes are safe, which is already something, but all the structure, graphics and programming I did for 2 weeks are lost. Bollocks...

Nothing even close has ever happened to me before.

I've lost config files when the PC took a crap while the file was open. It ALWAYS pays to have incremental backups.

We often forget that these are PCs and NOT Macs with 14 levels of backups. PCs are prone to failure at times, for no reason.

I'm with randman on this. I always append my projects with 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and so on. First thing I do when opening my project is save as and increment the number. This way if I have any problems I can always 'roll back' to the previous version. It goes without saying that they are backed up every night.

But you still need to make sure you have copies saved away from your computer. Without backups, you lose everything. I keep a copy of my XCF on my work computer, and occasionally (not often enough) back up my home PC.

I periodically burn my ProntoProject folder off to a CD.

I have a USB memory stick for the backups, and also a CD from time to time.

I do a full backup once a week and incremental backups everyday to an external disk. And, to be truly paranoid, I also do separate backups to a NAS, located elsewhere. This is all automated, so I set it and forget it. I used to take backups to CD (and to be really good, take the CDs offsite), but since it requires manual intervention, I've stopped doing it.