Lost Files - Animate

[default5u9dphyaxh7v]

My students' files keep crashing. I've had 3 different kids show me their work and then the next day Animate cannot open the file because it says it is corrupted. This is always towards the end of their projects. We've been able to get some stuff back through the recover files but they are still losing work. We are working with Windows 10. Thanks!

[kglad]

i've been using animate (previously called flash) for 20 years and have encountered rare crashes.  i don't know what could be happening that would cause 3 crashes in a limited group in a limited time period.

nevertheless, even the rare crash is worth preparing for so no significant amount of work is ever lost: periodically save your work with increasing version numbers.  eg, for project1.fla, save project1_v000.fla, project1_v001.fla, project1_v002.fla etc.

and you can periodically delete older versions that are not needed to recover file space.

[Joseph Labrecque]

Are they saving their projects across a network? I've heard that can soemtimes cause issues in classroom environments. Best to save locally and then transfer manually to network storage. 

[default5u9dphyaxh7v]

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply, last week of school craziness. 

We are using flash drives at the moment because we need to go back and forth between home and school. Kids are being quarantined for 2 weeks at a time when they come in contact with an infected case so I need them to have that flexibility. I told them to get new, larger capacity flash drives to hopefully help with this situation.

I've thought about them using their Google Drive accounts to store their files, but that is a lot of uploading and downloading every day (and getting the right file). They are in 7th grade, so it is hit or miss if they actually listen some days. lol

Thanks!

[kglad]

saving to an external drive is a recipe for problems.

they should save their files locally and then copy to external drives.  do not delete the local files unless you're very confident the external drives are secure and have uncorrupted copies.