Cannot load scene into memory your document may be damaged

[ashleywright]

I'm a high school teacher and my students are currently working in Animate CC 2017 to create a frame by frame animation. One of the students opened his file today to this message, "Cannot load scene into memory your document may be damaged". He lost three days of work and has no images in his library. We are working on Windows 7 computers.

Does anyone know the issue here? After talking with him, the only thing I can think of is the new paint brush tool, which he used. The file is showing that it is 389 KB, so I feel like something has to be there but we can't access it!

HELP!!!!

[kglad · Accepted solution]

his fla is corrupted.

this can happen periodically for a variety of reasons but the most common is the improper shutdown of animate while a fla is open.

this should prompt you to teach everyone to save their fla files periodically with different names.  if i have a project named myschool, i start it as myschool_v000 and assign the published files to be myschool.  then save myschool_v001, myschool_v002 etc.

that way you never lose more than the 10 or 15 minutes worth of work you did between saves and the save directory only has one set of published files.  you can periodically most of the earliest old versions so you don't have more than 5 or 10 versions saved.

anyway, at this point there's only a small chance of recovering some of the lost work.  you could rename the fla to a zip and use winrar to repair it.  then rename the repaired file to a fla and try and open it in animate.  i've never seen that work, but if and when it fails, unzip the repaired zip and see if any assets can be recovered.

[defaultxqzzqh3no4gw]

This happened to me before and I lost A LOT of work, learning that was because of improper shut down.  I got an error that I couldn't close out of, and it was completely blank.  I shut down my laptop, lost everything.  I just got that error again and after 30 minutes of doing everything but shutting down my laptop, I got it to say "Unable to create image buffer" with a little OK button that makes the error instantly pop up again, and I was able to do Ctrl + S to save it.  I think I've had times where it shut down and it wasn't lost, I don't want to assume anything but I think there's a chance of it being fine.  I just want to know if it would be fine if it was shut down right after it was saved... I just hit OK again out of boredom and it actually just went away.  If this happens to anyone left click on the app icon in your hotbar and open a recent file, hope that the error reveals itself, and then just be patient and try to click OK every once in a while.

[defaultxqzzqh3no4gw]

I continued to work... and I got one or 2 brush strokes in before the error popped up again.  Point of advice I guess is just save your work, close animate, and restart your computer then.  Currently waiting for the error to be nice again, I hope this can help someone.