Recover a corrupted AE file

Question

I was minutes from being done with my project and our apartment lost power. My save didn't finish and now my After Effects project won't open. I have an older version but it's about 6 hours of work behind(we obviously never expect this stuff).

Are there any ideas as to how I can recover my current file?

Attached is the error message I got.

SpectacularKevin · Accepted Answer

The newest auto-save is usually the one that you want to open.

Another appraoch is to start a new After Effect project and import each auto-save in to it. This will allow you to look through them and decide which one might be best to continue working from.

You could also try copying the original AEP to a new location and try importing that into a new project. It's a long shot, but could work.

So, I actrually found a solution. I realized After Effects only auto-saves when you haven't manually saved and since I save pretty consistently, I dropped my autosave time frame down to every 5 minutes.

As for recovering my file, I rendered a full version of my project before the crash. This version got saved as a "tmpAEtoAMEProject" and I was able to import this save into my older save and essentially pick up where I left off.

Warren Heaton · Answer

Unless you changed the default, you should have an auto-save project that's not more than fifteen minutes old in the Auto-Save folder right next to your After Effects project. There should be several auto-save projects from oldests to newest in that folder.

Open the most recent auto-save project, do File > Save As and save it to the same location as the original file (you can over-write the original with the same name or version the project file - I usually go with versioning it).

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