From GeniusDV:

Restoring an Autosaved Project in Final Cut Pro

When you begin work on a Final Cut Pro Project, the first thing you should do is give your project a name and save it so that the autosave function can work. Autosave will not work until you have named and saved your project first. If your machine should happen to crash or if FCP should happen to unexpectedly shut down, you can always restore the last autosaved version of your project.

Restoring an Autosaved Project

1 Click on a project tab in either the Browser Window or the timeline to make it active.

2 Go to File > Restore Project and an autosave dialog box will appear.

3 Choose the autosaved project from within the autosave box, then click OK to restore the latest autosaved version of that project. Make sure you save this restored file immediately by pressing Command S or going to File > Save.

I cannot over-stress the importance of auto-saving in Final Cut Pro. This feature has saved me on more than a few occasions. If you crash and lose the work you’ve done, it always helps to check the “Restore Project” dialog and see if Final Cut Pro had saved your project at the last minute.

I would add a few more related tips of my own:

1. Max out the Auto Save Feature
I have my auto save set to save every 5 minutes, keep 40 copies of a project (incremental saves) and be doing this with 50 projects. The defaults that ship with Final Cut Pro are much lower than this. Trust me on this one. Do this in the Final Cut Pro menu / User Preferences.

2. Move your Auto Save Vault to your System Drive
Final Cut Pro defaults to placing your auto save vault on your main scratch disc – which is your system drive, but often video editors change this to another drive – many times this is a FireWire drive or RAID array. I’ve had so many drives die on me that were used for video, but none (knock on wood) that were system drives. I just feel it’s safer to keep the autosave vault in my User / Documents folder.

3. Back up your Auto Save Vault
It can’t hurt to occasionally back up your auto save vault to either an external hard drive, NAS, or even a hard copy on CD or DVD. There are two simple reasons for this: in case you need to find an earlier revision of something you’re working on or to save yourself in the case that your main FCP project file gets deleted or corrupted.
When I finish a project and archive it to hard drive or DVD, I always make a copy of that project’s auto save vault (for the backup reasons listed in step 3). It can’t hurt to have a permanent record.

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Filed under: Audio, Product Review, Tutorial, Video