psx won't open following crash (missing xml file)

[wyowill]

Hello,

The psx file I was working on when MetaShape (v.1.5.3) crashed won't open.  The message I receive:

       ! Can't open archive: mypath/filename.files/0/0/frame.zip

I can confirm that 'frame.zip' is present in the specified location, but has no content. By contrast, companion folders seeming to belong to other chunks (e.g. filename.files/1/0/frames.zip) all contain doc.xml files which contain photo information.

MetaShape will open and I can run other psx files I used yesterday, just not the one that was open at time of crash.

At the time of the crash I was getting weird (Windows) memory errors I've never seen previously and had already restarted MetaShape once.  The timing of the errors was particularly strange because I was only georeferencing photos at the time.  My PC has 32GB of RAM and I regularly run alignments on "highest" and even dense clouds on "high" (albeit slowly) without incident.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Will

#####  UPDATE #####

the 'doc.xml' file in filename.files\0\chunk.zip  contains some common information with the missing xml file.  It's formatted differently, but I've at least been able to recover image names and enabled status (which saves me from revisiting 5-6 hours of manual image review & selection).

##### UPDATE 2 #####

I created a new psx file and read images from the extracted list to ~replicate the corrupt chunk. I created the same number of chunks (albeit empty) as the original psx file. Then copied the "1", "2", and "3" folders from the parent directory (filename.files) associated with the original psx file into filename.files associated with the new psx file.  I lost the alignment from the main chunk, but was able to recover everything else.

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello Will,

If contents of frame.zip (or chunk.zip) are corrupted or lost, it is not possible, unfortunately, to recover this information from other files.

[wyowill]

Cheers Alexey.

Any idea why the file would simply disappear in a crash?  Perhaps more importantly, what's the best way to prevent in the future?

Regards