Resaving .ma File As .mb After Maya Crash

[haikai]

When Maya crashes it will often try to save the scene into my local settings temp folder, but it will save it as .ma. This is fine except that there are times when I try to resave the file as .mb that Maya gives me the following error message:

" Error: File contains unknown nodes or data. To preserve this information, the current file type cannot be changed "

This doesn't happen all the time, but should I be concerned with the "unknown nodes or data?" Oddly enough, I can rename the file via the OS and things appear to work, but that seems to be an unsafe solution, and I'd hate to continue working on the scene if it had somehow become more prone to corruption or something like that.

EDIT: actually, simply renaming the file does NOT fix the problem... Maya will continue to try and save the scene as .ma.

Now, I know all you pros out there live and die by the .ma format, but I find it annoying for what I need to do because it seems to take longer to open and save (especially in very large scenes) and is also quite a bit larger in file size than .mb (often double).

Any advice would be appreciated!

-hai

[drblacksnake]

perhaps this would address Your problem
http://www.highend3d.com/boards/index.php?showtopic=221172

[jason-howey]

Hey, if you delete all "unknown" nodes then you can save.

type this in:

string $badNodes[] = ls -type unknown;
delete $badNodes;

now try saving.

I'm not in front of maya put I'm pretty sure that's the syntax.

unknown nodes are created usually by mel scripts to store data.
if you were to type this in:
createNode jiberish;
it'll create an "unknown" node since "jiberish" isn't a standard maya node type.
Maya has no idea what kind of data is in the node so therefore it has no idea how to convert
that data from ascii to binary or vise versa.