Animate FLA file corrupt?

[winston6708]

I worked on an Animate fla file yesterday and this morning went to open it and it says it cannot open and gives a javascript error.  I don't have any priors I can use and no SWF. There weren't any in the media cache and I tried the RAR fix and it didn't work...am I out of luck? 

Thanks!

[Colin Holgate]

Are there any recovery files in the same folder as the main FLA?

That there were none in the media coaches folder just means that you had successfully saved before you quit yesterday. I don't know of a way to fix the FLA that you haven't already tried.

[joechump]

I have just experienced this exact problem. Unfortunately the file is screwed as all the data has been lost from it and is now 1KB in size. 2 days work down the toilet. Not nearly good enough for 'professional' software. I want to love you Animate but you make it so damn hard.

[rayek.elfin]

I don't understand: aren't you using some kind of (automatic) versioning in your workflow/process? I save many versions over the span of a day's work, and use something like Git in most of my work.

Never trust any software to work with only one version of your file.

Although I do feel for you (I've been there too). I learned the hard way, and integrated a solid versioning workflow a long time ago to prevent similar debacles from occurring.

[joechump]

I don't have automatic versions but I would normally have a number of versions saved and also backed up but a hectic week on the move and way from the office so no.

I'm used to Animate crashing 6 times a day and it's always been very unstable since I started using it back when it was Flash 2 or 3 I think. But the corruption/not saving thing is a totally new one on me in 20 years. Although I did have to turn autosave off on one version because it was crashing it!

Thing is, I noticed something was wrong and tried to save new versions but that failed. Wish I'd grabbed the temp file before restarting.

I accept that to a certain extent it's on me but even if I'd only lost an hour's work I'd still be unnerved by the lack of reliability. I need to be able to rely on this stuff and I would expect that after 20+ years of development of the software some of this fundamental stuff might have been fixed by now. I'd rather have stability and rock solid saving than new features.

[rayek.elfin]

I agree with you. It's one of the many reasons why I moved away from Flash for animation myself, and software (in particular animation software) ought to be more reliable than that.

It is what it is, I suppose.

[ankushr40215001]

Hi Elizabeth,

Very sorry for the loss of your project, I can understand what it takes when a good amount of creative work gets vanished in just minutes.

I will try my best to help you out. However, not sure if we can actually get your file recovered.

If its a Mac then I guess you can try restoring through time machine.

Would you mind sharing your Fla file so I can send it across to our engineering team and try getting it fixed?

To share the file you can upload it to any file sharing service like Dropbox and send the download link to me in a private message.

* For doing a private message hover the mouse on my picture and click "message".

Thanks,

Ankush

[joechump · Accepted solution]

Even with 2019 (which is generally more stable) I'm still experiencing this. Seems to be worse when various art brushes are used but that could be a red herring...

One workaround I've found is to leave the file open. Sometimes it just allows a save later (just hope it doesn't crash...)

The other thing that *seems* to work is to keep another older version of Animate installed: Open Animate 2018 or 2017, then open any file in that version of animate. Any other .fla file (not the problem one). Then close the file. Or make a new file and save it somewhere. Basically fiddle around with another file or two in an old version of Animate whilst leaving your current version with the problem save open... This seems to kick start your current version back into life and fix the permissions allowing it to save.

Another thing you can do if desperate is to open the older version of Animate and paste your assets into a new file. (You can't paste frames when doing this but assets on the stage should be ok.

This could be a Mac operating system thing but I've tried all the suggested fixes for permissions to no avail and it only seems to happen with Adobe software (I think it happened to me once in InDesign.)

[joechump]

To be clear, this won't fix a corrupt file but is a workaround for when the error message pops up saying that a file cannot be saved. When this happens, you have a reasonable chance to salvage it or the contents as long as you don't close the file!