I was working with Maya 8.5 and I had a pretty good scene up. I save as .mb because whenever I save as .ma it says that some things will not be saved properly or something. Well anyways, I was working on the scene and was trying to undo some things and it wasn’t working very well. i mean it would undo things. So I closed out of Maya and opened up my scene again. I created part of a prop and decided it was a good time to save. So I did but it gave me an error saying “ Could not save file”. So I kept trying to save and it appeared as if it wasn’t working. So I went to where my file was, note I did not save as, as I was saving on a file, and when I went to where my file was, there were all these weird files. They had the name of my original fie, but in the extension it said .mb(then just random letters), and every one of those files had different random numbers. So I decided to click save again to see if it would make another file, and it did. So I tried to save as and it wouldn’t work either, but this time it showed up in the folder as a Maya file. I decided to try to open it and it didn’t work. So I tried to reopen my original file and now it says un-recognizable file type, yet it is a .mb. So I tried to open my other Maya files (note I tried opening files that I had not worked on today) and every single file wouldn’t open. The ones that were unrecognizable were ones with extension .mb. If one did open, however, it was all distorted and models were missing and were in the wrong places, and EVERYTHING was, what appeared to be wireframe (I’m not sure because it would let me shade anything either). I have been working on it for more than 10 months and now it won’t open. I’ve tried opening it on two different macs, I’ve tried restarting my computer and nothing seems to work. What makes it worse is this is a project for school and now if it can’t be fixed, I have nothing. If anybody knows what’s going please help me. It would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
EDIT: When I open the file up in TextEdit this is what I get (this is normally not what it looks like AT ALL) : L*Ï (it wouldn’t let me post the res but the L T thingy is what it starts with)

Hi!
Have you tried opening your files in another computer?
Back up your maya pref folder. Delete it and start Maya again and try opening your files. Sometimes pref get corrupted

It is now happening again and I cannot find out why. Two days after I posted the original post it was able to save again and everything was working fine again and has been ever since. but I don’t know why it started working. Now it’s happening again and I’ve restarted and shutdown the computers and it will not work. Can anyone help.

It is happening again. Two days after I posted the original post, it fixed itself and started working perfectly again, but i don’t know why. Now it is happening again and I’ve tried restarting and shutting down the computers and it isn’t working . Can anyone help?

A few answers from your first post.

“I save as .mb because whenever I save as .ma it says that some things will not be saved properly or something.”

This is easy to fix, in the outliner, set it to display all nodes, down the very bottom of your list, will be some “unknown” nodes.
delete these.
you should be able to save now.

Unknown nodes are created from nodes that require a plugin, if you have a special plugin loaded, save your file and open it on a computer that doesnt have the plugin, all the nodes that are related to that plug, become these unknown nodes.

“They had the name of my original fie, but in the extension it said .mb(then just random letters)”
these files are wha maya names its temp file, as it saves a new copy of the file, then once the save is good, it deletes the old file and renames its temp file.

If you have a pile of these in a dir, it because of your multiple failed save attempts. You can delete these.

“says un-recognizable file type”
because the file hasnt save correctly, you loose your maya binary file, it will never open.
This is why in production we prefer .ma’s, because if the files doesnt save correctly, you can recover it, or merge it with an older version, so you dont completely lose all your work.

Since it happen sporatilly i think you are getting some sort of memory leak or something when your saving.
As soon as the first instance of this happens, restart maya.

And as soon as you can , remove the “unknown” nodes and save out a .ma, this is much easier to debug the scene file in a text editor.

Hope this helps.

If someone stumble upon this thread doing search, just wanted to tell you where was my problem...had the same situation as the author of this thread, and eventually figured out that the problem was in no space on my hard disk...yeah, sounds trivially, but that was the problem in my case, my hard drive was totally full, so it didn’t have any more space left to write down the files, so it kept that temp version with number after the extension.

hope this helps someone

cheers!