Known Participant

Question

Went to Publish Adobe Captivate project... now all my desktop files are gone

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
March 19, 2018
3 replies
994 views

Hello,

I recently went to publish the final project I've been working on, and I went through the publishing process and selected the saving destination to be my desktop. An error message appeared in Captivate then the program shut down and all of my desktop files were deleted.

I'm currently using a Mac, running OS X El Capitan version 10.11.6; and I've spoken with Apple support representatives on the phone, and we were not apple to retrieve any of the lost documents. I have an appointment with Apple tomorrow, to see if anything can be salvaged.

I am wondering if this has happened to anyone else, and if so what can I do to avoid this in the future when I try to publish the final project again?

I have had issues with Captivate before where I've had to reset and shut down my computer, and seeing an error message was nothing new. However, this is a lot more substantial.

This topic has been closed for replies.

kdmemory

Inspiring

Hi Martin and Hamatu82

and anybody else on MacOS. This is tragic and I can understand that you are furious. You've learned the hard way.
Never ever do that (again)! Don't publish a Captivate project to Desktop. Always publish to a dedicated publish folder. If you like or are used to publish to Desktop, create there a dedicated folder first and select that one as the publish folder. Captivate indeed assumes that when you publish to a location/folder that everything that is/was there before can be deleted.

Klaus

RodWard

Community Expert

Just to add to Klaus' suggestion: Also never publish to the same folder location (and at the same level) where your CPTX file lives, otherwise you may end up losing your project file.

I have known users that specified their Default Location for Project Cache as the same folder location where they kept their CPTX project files, thinking perhaps that a Project Cache was where they were supposed to keep projects. But then one day they Clear Cache in Preferences and BOOM, they lose their project files.

Traps for young players.

H

hamatu82

Participant

This just happened to me today and I'm furious! I'm also using Mac. How is it even possible, that Captivate can delete all my files on desktop without any confirmation? Error message appeared (Could not delete files), but still all the desktop files were gone. But nothing like "Are you sure you want to delete all files?" etc. How did this end for you? Were you able to recover any lost files? I tried a recovery program, but with no luck.

H

hamatu82

Participant

I was also publishing project and selecting the saving destination when this happened. My colleague had been working on the project and it was trying to save the output on her computer's desktop. I hit delete to remove that destination and tried to change it to my desktop, when it suddenly deleted my desktop instead.

RodWard

Community Expert

Captivate overwrites files in the publish location. You need to select a different folder location. The default location that Captivate selects when installed is usually a special folder created in your user profile. However, if you have over-ridden this setting and selected another location, Captivate assumes you don't need to save files in that location when you next publish to it.

M

Martin_Shook_ComDesignerAuthor

Known Participant

In almost all the times I published my project I've published it to the Desktop as a ZIP file, and I haven't experienced Captivate overwriting files. Does this normally occur when the project is published as a ZIP file???

RodWard

Community Expert

I've just done some tests and it does NOT appear as if your files should have been deleted.

But you mentioned that something weird happened during the publish operation and Captivate shut down in the middle of the operation. Perhaps the delete occurred as a result of that.

I'm on a Windows installation so I cannot really offer any guidance on what effect such a glitch might have had on your OS. Are you perhaps on a corporate network situation where your user profile is NOT on your local machine?

I've never had a similar issue with Windows, but we do sometimes see people here reporting that they published to the same folder location as their CPTX and then found they inadvertently deleted their project file. So being careful about your publish file location is quite important.

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