Lost 3 months of work due to damaged file/crash. Looking for any possible help.

[rolandp70919305]

Hi everyone. So as the title indicates, I’m suffering some extreme data loss strife and feel like I have exhausted all my options but figured I would share my SOS here in case there are tactics I may have missed.

Not to sound antagonistic (I know it’s well-intentioned), but please don’t reply to suggest better back-up practices. I know, and will absolutely incorporate them into future work to prevent anything like this from happening again. I’ll be continuing work on an external drive as well as versioning out backups to the cloud.

So here’s the gist:

1. I was working on animation project of 2/3 months.
2. I saved it, as I do frequently.
3. The project indicated it was saved, so I closed Animate.
4. It wasn’t going anywhere, so I did a Force Quit (potentially the operative screw-up here)
5. Didn’t think much of it, and restarted my comp to switch to a Windows partition.
6. Later that night, realize after returning to my Mac partition that there is ZERO trace of my project files. Nothing.
7. I even check the Library recovery folders (I have Animate autosave a RECOVER_FileName every 15 minutes for the occasional crash) in Application Support. Nothing. Adobe had nuked those too.

So I do some googling on the topic, and realize I’m not alone. It appears that the file got damaged somehow, and Adobe for some earthly reason, wiped everything to do with my .fla project file. I realize I might be screwed since I didn’t have proper backups or versioning, which is totally on me.

I look into data recovery software from third party devs and download a couple of them — Disk Drill and Wondershare’s Recoverit. Here’s what followed from that.

1. Recoverit allows you to target a specific folder to scrape through its history, so I begin with where my project originally was.
2. This turns out many files that match the filename and roughly the size of .fla I was looking for, so I restore them to my new external drive. I have uploaded the most "promising" of the files in this folder.
3. None of the FLAs open in Animate. I get an error message indicating that they are all corrupted.
4. I try running another sweep on Recoverit targeting the /tmp folder where _RECOVER files typically are. Nothing.
   
   

From here I’m a bit unsure what to do. I am running yet another sweep on my Trash folder in the hopes that it finds a recovery file I intentionally may have deleted in the past few days. But here I am. Does anyone have thoughts or suggestions on how I can restore corrupted work? Many thanks in advance.

[JoãoCésar]

Hi.

I'm really sorry for that.

Lots of users complain of losing their work here.

Besides trying the softwares you mentioned, you could also try Recuva, from Piriform. But I suggest you to run these softwares in a bigger scope. If you have the time, let them verify your user folder, applications storage or even a whole volume.

Also, in case you were using an AS3 document, do you still have the SWF file? You can try decompiling it using a software like Sothink SWF Decompiler.

Please let us know.

Regards,

JC

[rolandp70919305]

Thank you for your reply! I'm having some trouble finding Recuva for Mac (I should have mentioned my OS above), would you be able to provide a link?

As for the other part, I was able to recover several SWFs. I'm similarly having issues finding a way to download Sothink or other SWF decompilers. They either close upon launch or are too outdated to run on my OS, so any linking or help there is appreciated as well. 🙂

[JoãoCésar]

Awesome!

Yeah. It seems there's only Recuva for Windows. But you can keep trying with the ones you already have. And as I said before, it's worth trying a bigger scope, IMHO.

About SWF Decompiler, it seems it won't work in 64-bit macOS computers. But do you have a Windows machine available somewhere? You can install the decompiler on it.

[rolandp70919305]

Just tried this on my Windows partition. Unfortunately the decompiler (JPEXS) wasn't able to open the SWFs I had. Thank you for the suggestion though

[_keyframer]

I tried downloading one of your FLAs and couldn't open here (Monterey). Have you tried installing older versions of Animate to see if they'll open it? Were you using Asset Warp tool by chance?

[rolandp70919305]

I'll try this, but my assumption was that if Animate CC 2022 couldn't open it, an older one wouldn't be able to either! But I'll try. I didn't use Asset Warp in this project.

[Nicktendo28]

Did you look around your hard drive or your computer hard drive to see if maybe there was a recovery animate file that might've saved some of your stuff?

[rolandp70919305]

 I did -- The crazy thing about this is that Adobe deleted those recovery files as well. Totally mystifies me!