You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
Hello. I am making imovie. I made extensive edits mid-November 2022, titles etc. I opened iMovie January and all November edits are gone; previous edits present. Anyway to retrieve? At times during edit iMovie would crash. Maybe crashed before saved? Very frustrating, hours lost! Any comments other than too bad...start over?
iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 12.6
Hey again. I tried the pathway and no luck. I am now suspicious that it was not saved. I am unable to get a list of icloud drives (archives) as displayed on your screen shot. I guess I will try to find a tutor. thanks again for your help
Bob
Adding to my previous post, you need to find out why your iMovie app is crashing. Possibly you do not have enough free space on the drive where iMovie is located. So check your free space and make sure that your have at least 20-25 GB.
Or, there might be some conflict on your Mac that is causing iMovie to crash. Try shutting down and starting up in Safe Mode. After everything loads, immediately shut down again and start up in normal mode. That will clear out any conflicts that might be troublesome.
See this link for instructions:
Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support
-- Rich
Your Library item will display when you go to the Go/Home screen and click on the Action button at the top of the screen, then Show View Options, and then click on Show Library Folder in the drop down menu that appears.
You should keep your iMovie app on your internal drive, not on an external drive or the cloud. It is only about 2.7 GB in size. Your iMovie library, as distinquished from the app, should be kept on the internal drive or on an external drive that is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or APFS. It cannot be stored in the cloud.
-- Rich
Hi, bobmesagj,
Try looking in the iMovie Backups folder to retrieve a previously automatically saved library in the mid-November time frame.
To get to the iMovie Backups folder, follow this file path from the Finder menu:
Go/Home/Library/Containers/com.apple.iMovieApp/Data/Library/Caches/iMovieBackups
When you get there you will see a list of previous backups of your iMovie library. Click on one dated just before
your issue started. iMovie will open in that library. It will not overwrite your current library. Navigate to your projects browser (where your projects are displayed as icons) and see if your projects are intact.
If the above doesn't solve it, try using you Time Machine backup, if you have one, to restore your library to a point in time before losing the edits. Restore it to a different location than your current library, or it will overwrite the current library.
-- Rich
thanks Rich8339. I do not have a library/containers pathway after Go/Home. At 'home' I do have a 'movies' folder but when I open it, it just opens my iMovie from pre-November...no cache/iMovies backups found. I do have a WD passport for Mac but I am unable to find the backup there either. When I talked to a tech yeserday about this they said that iMovie is too big for icloud (which I also have) backup and could not be there, so maybe iMovie is too big for the wd drive. I will see what my free space is and attempt other crash redmedies you suggest.
thanks for immediate attention.
Guess I will have to start over...
Bob
thanks again Rich. I called apple tech and they found I have 748 GB space available of 1 TB. My WD drive ha 56GB available of 999.83GB.So they said this is enough storage to run iMovie. I will follow the pathway you suggest for iCloud but as I said previous the Apple tech yesterday said iMovie is too large to be stored in iCloud, and some senior tech he consulted agreed; said that Imovie could not be stored on iCloud because of size . I will give your pathway a try tho, maybe they are wrong. I do have IMovie on internal drive, not cloud or WD.
thanks again for prompt reply.
Bob
To clarify, the Backups pathway I suggested was to get to the iMovie Backups folder, not to iCloud.
Once you get the Library item to display in the window via Show Library Folder as in my screen shot, click on "Library" and follow the rest of the path to the iMovie Backups folder. Maybe that's what you already did, but I was not sure.
When you say that you tried the pathway but "no luck", what actually happened? Did you get to the iMovie backups folder?
-- Rich
Hello again. Theree is no iMovie backup folder. Only iMovies folder which contains only 'plug in' and 'sound'. I guess what I mean when I followed path was than I did not find any archived iMovie files at all. I will keep nosing around.
Thanks again...
Bob
O.K. Well, best of luck in resolving your issue. I have no idea as to why you don't have an iMovie Backups folder on your Mac. iMovie automatically backs up as one edits the project, so unless there is something wrong there would necessarily have to be a backups folder. I guess the techs at Apple support couldn't solve it either.
Unfortunately, you may be at the place where you need to start over. Do the Safe Mode reboot to see if you can avoid iMovie crashing again. Also, a Time Machine backup is a very good safety net for these types of issues.
-- Rich
Hello Rich 839. Just want to let you know that Apple senior tech by telephone call found my file. Took 1 hour 21 minutes through several pathway attempts but success finally. I think this was the path it but I didn't take a screen shot but it loaded the file just a minute ago. Path: WD passbook-backup-owners mac-2022-11-15 folder-Mac HD data-library-users-owner-movies-imovie library. I did not think it was this long a path this morning so there may be a short cut. My iMovie project of November now loads when I click on iMovie icon. I am 77 and comprehension and navigation memory get more difficult. Thanks again for your interest and help
Bob
OK. thanks again for help...
bob
Great! I'm glad that you were able to recover your project and get iMovie working.
-- Rich
Imovie edits lost
