Went to Publish Adobe Captivate project... now all my desktop files are gone

[Martin_Shook_ComDesigner]

Hello,

I recently went to publish the final project I've been working on, and I went through the publishing process and selected the saving destination to be my desktop. An error message appeared in Captivate then the program shut down and all of my desktop files were deleted.

I'm currently using a Mac, running OS X El Capitan version 10.11.6; and I've spoken with Apple support representatives on the phone, and we were not apple to retrieve any of the lost documents. I have an appointment with Apple tomorrow, to see if anything can be salvaged.

I am wondering if this has happened to anyone else, and if so what can I do to avoid this in the future when I try to publish the final project again?

I have had issues with Captivate before where I've had to reset and shut down my computer, and seeing an error message was nothing new. However, this is a lot more substantial.

[RodWard]

Captivate overwrites files in the publish location.  You need to select a different folder location.  The default location that Captivate selects when installed is usually a special folder created in your user profile.  However, if you have over-ridden this setting and selected another location, Captivate assumes you don't need to save files in that location when you next publish to it.

[Martin_Shook_ComDesigner]

In almost all the times I published my project I've published it to the Desktop as a ZIP file, and I haven't experienced Captivate overwriting files. Does this normally occur when the project is published as a ZIP file???

[RodWard]

I've just done some tests and it does NOT appear as if your files should have been deleted.

But you mentioned that something weird happened during the publish operation and Captivate shut down in the middle of the operation.  Perhaps the delete occurred as a result of that.

I'm on a Windows installation so I cannot really offer any guidance on what effect such a glitch might have had on your OS.  Are you perhaps on a corporate network situation where your user profile is NOT on your local machine?

I've never had a similar issue with Windows, but we do sometimes see people here reporting that they published to the same folder location as their CPTX and then found they inadvertently deleted their project file.  So being careful about your publish file location is quite important.

[Martin_Shook_ComDesigner]

Hi Rob,

Thank you for your quick replies.

Yes Captivate immediately shut down after I clicked 'publish,' and an error message then prior to shutting down. However, I did not screenshot or record what the error message was. In my experience, Captivate has errors occurring quite frequently, so I did not think anything of it.

Unfortunately, I am not on a corporate network; I work from a profile that is on my local machine.

I will make sure to be careful about publishing locations, I have an Apple help appointment today, to try and solve the issue if I come to any solution I will post it here.

[I-Am-So-Professional]

Yes, Cp overwrites published files that occupy the same folder as specified in the Publish dialog, but not other files. I have been trained by my company in Cp2019 and NEVER heard about this being an issue. I publish to HTML5 in the same folder as my projects all day long, both as ZIP and uncompressed. In all cases, and regardless of folder, Cp does not touch any other files in those folders. Why would it be SOP to delete all files in a folder in which a project is published? That goes against logic. Or are we talking about Cp logic?

[hamatu82]

This just happened to me today and I'm furious! I'm also using Mac. How is it even possible, that Captivate can delete all my files on desktop without any confirmation? Error message appeared (Could not delete files), but still all the desktop files were gone. But nothing like "Are you sure you want to delete all files?" etc. How did this end for you? Were you able to recover any lost files? I tried a recovery program, but with no luck.

[hamatu82]

I was also publishing project and selecting the saving destination when this happened. My colleague had been working on the project and it was trying to save the output on her computer's desktop. I hit delete to remove that destination and tried to change it to my desktop, when it suddenly deleted my desktop instead.

[kdmemory]

Hi Martin and Hamatu82

and anybody else on MacOS. This is tragic and I can understand that you are furious. You've learned the hard way.
Never ever do that (again)! Don't publish a Captivate project to Desktop. Always publish to a dedicated publish folder. If you like or are used to publish to Desktop, create there a dedicated folder first and select that one as the publish folder. Captivate indeed assumes that when you publish to a location/folder that everything that is/was there before can be deleted.

Klaus

[RodWard]

Just to add to Klaus' suggestion: Also never publish to the same folder location (and at the same level) where your CPTX file lives, otherwise you may end up losing your project file. 

I have known users that specified their Default Location for Project Cache as the same folder location where they kept their CPTX project files, thinking perhaps that a Project Cache was where they were supposed to keep projects.  But then one day they Clear Cache in Preferences and BOOM, they lose their project files. 

Traps for young players.

[hamatu82]

Good to know! I have been using Captivate now for 2 years and always published projects to my Desktop without problems. I suspected that an error happened when I was trying to change the output location, but it's very hard to understand that this is just the way Captivate works.