Adobe Animate file completely gone?

[tracyp20463547]

I've been using Adobe Animate 2018 for about 2 years now, and only about three weeks ago switched to the 2019 version. (I tried the 2020 version first but it was horrible.) I've been working on an animation for about two weeks on there. I left for a week long holiday and came back to the file completely gone. I've searched through recently opened, all the files on my mac, nothing. At first, it was under my recently opened but when I tried to open it all I got was an error message reading 'This file does not exist and will be removed from the list," or something along those lines. It is now completely gone. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm sort of a noob when it comes to most Adobe Animate features, because I basically taught myself how to use the program, so there might be a simple solution that I'm missing. This is super frustrating. 

[n. tilcheff]

Hi mate,

I'm sorry for the loss of your work.

The simple solution does exist indeed and is called 'backup to external drive(s)'.

Terabytes of disk space cost very little these days. 

Save your files under a new name several times a day as you go and do nightly backups to avoid unpleasant situations like this.

[tracyp20463547]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Albeit unfortionate, I am very glad that you told me about this! This will come in very handy for future projects, especially when I try to recreate what I've lost. I am pretty surprised I've never heard of this before haha, but I should've took the time to learn more about Adobe Animate when I first got it. 

Thank you!

[n. tilcheff]

Hi again, mate!

Just in case if you misunderstood me:

Backing up to an external drive is just general good practice that applies to all kinds of computer work and is not specific to Animate.

The specific advice is to Save As... several times a day (you can add version numbers at the end of your file name), so that you have versions of your project that you can go back to in case something goes wrong.

There are also automated solutions for this kind of thing.

Good luck!