After effects file not opening, showing up as "0 items"

Question

One day I was editing a video for my school assessment, the video was around 5 minute in length and filled with a lot of transitions and effects so it was quite large in size. I tried to put twixtor on one of my clips, ae crashed and displayed multiple different crashed message such as the one below.

Everytime I try to open the same project it would always save a different copy (e.g. video_1_1_1.aep....) and crash. I reinstalled ae but when I tried to open the project it will just stay in the "new composition, new composition from footage" screen, or show up as no item. I tried opening some of my other project files and they all opened, its just the ones that I was working on.

what I have tried:

install an older version of ae
reinstall the up-to-date version in a different path
uninstalled my 3rd party plugins

my computer: m1 mac mini with 500gb storage, after effects 2021

Any help will be appreciated since the due date is 2 weeks away and i really don't want to lose all my past month's progress. Thank You.

Mylenium · Answer

Unfortunately AE's file structures are structured in such a way that it's impossible to recover them outside of AE and unless one of the developers cares to chime in and offers to have a look, there is no way to retrieve any of the data. That's why it's crucial to make good use of incremental saving, saving copies and backing data up to otehr media. If you worked on this for months, you really should have at least 20 versions of this in various previous stages of completion. Sorry for the bad news, but this is really pretty much hopeless and just starting over would be a more efficient use of your time than hoping for a miraculous recovery of the files.

Mylenium

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