Help! Corrupted maya file

what is the worse crashing scenario you have ever had?

no worries i m not going to explode every one out here with programming terms n whatnot, just layman terms.

before i experienced this particular crash, i used to think that maya crashing WHILE it is saving the file is the worst possible case of scenario. it wrecks the original file, rendered out a useless file with nothing inside.

let me top this up.

my file crashed while saving.... and thank god!! maya activated the emergency saving in the temp folder... all is well i thought. to my amazement, the original file was corrupted. NOTHING inside. 0 kb ok...
n the thing is, during the emergency saving, the emergency file in the temp folder is also fucked up. (remember what i said about layman terms) everytime i tried to open this file, maya crashes non stop.

so what is the first thing you would do if you have any technical problems with your software?
you google the damn problem.

yea yea there are sites n companies offering to repair your broken file, with a fee of course.
any broken file too..

i m not gonna fall for that.. i searched for other softwares that could open maya files, hoping i could re-export them out again... i stumbled upon Unity, Deep Exploration etc etc
no luck. error reading the file.


So what is the effing solution when you have like a barrage of animation, objects in your scene which crashed and left you with a useless file?
you better hoped you had organized your scene systematically..in layers n groups n shit.

the very simple solution is to open up maya. n drag the file from your folder into maya.
it sounds like file>import but its not... importing a file reads the whole file, dragging in a file into the scene is safer as it keeps the original architecture of the maya scene.

after this is done, you will notice some missing objects/layers/animation/nodes, cuz these missing objects/layers/whatnots are causing the error. if you try to delete these nodes or whatnots, your file may crash again.
what is safe to do is to select all your SAFE objects n re-export them into another maya file.

n i guess you will have to rebuild n rework your bad objects/ whatnots.

or you can pay those dudes to repair your file.... if you have a better alternative like fixing the maya file in a text editor with some high end programming, i will be glad to hear of it... let me know if you can help me...

let me know too if i have helped you. :)