HELP! My Character Animator Project Crashed and won't reopen

[reverie555]

So I ran out of disk space while exporting a puppet and it caused Character animator to crash. Now it geve this error and won't reopen. I spent three days on it. Is there anyway to recover it? Are there any previous versions that I can recover? 

[TheOriginalGC]

The first thing to try is to hold down the "alt" key while starting to do a fresh start without loading the previous project.

[reverie555]

That didn't work. Once the character animator is opened without a project opened, and I choose to open to that project. It gives the same error. 

[TheOriginalGC]

Maybe someone with technical expertise can offer assistance in recovering the project. Otherwise, you would have to import the original file into a new project, which sounds like you're trying to avoid.

[reverie555]

Welp. Went to customer support and after two hours, they were just like "Oh well,  it's damaged" WHY IS THERE NO AUTOSAVE IF THIS TYPE OF THING CAN HAPPEN?  Is there anyone from the Character Animator team that understands the file structures, that could help me retrieve this?? 

[TheOriginalGC]

I don't work for Adobe, so I can't help you. But there is a chance that someone that works there can recover the file. But try not to get your hopes up. You've encountered what CH uses for autosave already.

[dtull-adobe]

I work on the Character Animator team and might be able to help (you can find my name if you search around). If you can send me a link to a zip file with just the "Ch Data\repo.noindex" subfolder of the project, I can inspect it and see why it didn't automatically repair itself (and probably fix it up if that's possible in this situation -- it often is, at least with the new file format)

Projects created with more recent versions of the software should be in a file format called rope which is far harder to corrupt and I've even used small disk images to test the out of disk space issue in particular and it was able to auto repair when space was freed, but I've also seen operating systems do really ugly things to their file systems when they run out of disk space, so maybe it got thrown off by that...

Dan Tull

[reverie555]

I just messaged you a link! 

[Erica Schisler]

We're looking for someone directly on the Character Animator team to help. We'll get back to you as soon as we find the right person. 

[reverie555 · Accepted solution]

dtull-adobe was able to fix it. It was mostly a matter of renaming the damaged projectdata.rope file in the repo.noindex folder. Once it was named back to projectdata.rope it opened fine. Also in the future. If you are exporting and run out of disk space and crash. Besure to free up your disk space before opening character animator back up. 

[Erica Schisler]

So glad it got worked out! Thank you so much for posting the resolution. 

[dtull-adobe]

I wanted to take a moment to explain a bit more about this in case it helps somebody else in this situation. The rope file is an append only file format. The app has a read only handle to the file that it seeks around with, but writes only ever happen at the end of the file. This makes it extremely resilient. Short of disk failure or outside corruption, fixing a broken file can pretty much always be accomplished by simply truncating snipping off the "frayed" end of the rope file. This is why we don't keep a separate autosaved version, the file _is_ the autosave.

The automatic repair mechanism for rope is to rename the file and then copy blocks from it to a pristine new file. This is out of an abundance of caution. A rename should be fast, safe, and not modify the contents or layout of the file (for example, if the corruption happened due to running into or through a bad block on disk) so if auto repair gets a suboptimal result, we'll have a chance to inspect and diagnose it later. The next step is read from the beginning of the file and copy blocks to a pristine new file until we hit the invalid part of the old file and then stop.

In this case, since it was opened while there was still no space, it renamed but then didn't get a new file created and populated, so renaming it back after the disk space issue was resolved could engage the usual auto repair which could finish correctly.

What it should probably do is check for other .rope files if the projectdata.rope file isn't found and initiate the repair at the block copy step from the most recent one in that case, but if you're reading this and your version of Ch doesn't have that bit of bulletproofing, renaming it back should let it work. If it doesn't, don't hesitate to reach out and ask for help!

[matt_6924]

Hello,

I'm having a similar issue several years later. I was editing a scene in my character animator project and the application crashed. I restarted but cannot reopen the project. Based on this thread I located the repo.noindex folder and tried changing the .rope filename to projectdata_old.rope but it did not fix the issue. Here is what I am seeing when I try to open the project file:

Can someone on the Character Animator team help?? Thanks in advance!

Matt  

[TheOriginalGC]

I'll see if Dan is available to address your issue. Until then, it strikes me that the program is still attempting to open the the current .rope file since you didn't actually change the file extension. Try changing the file extension of the file and see if that helps.

[matt_6924]

Thanks for reply. I tried changing the .rope file to an .old file extension as below. Unfortunately the same issue is persisting. Thanks for reaching out to Dan Tull! 

[TheOriginalGC]

Unfortunately, that was my only idea. Sadly, I'm not very useful when it comes to technical issues. You can always reach out to Dan directly by clicking on his UserID and messaging him there. I'm just a volunteer here on the forum, so I really don't have much insight into the inner workings at Adobe. But I'll try and find if someone can help you.

[matt_6924]

Thanks again. I'll try reaching out to Dan directly. I'll post here if he is able to resolve the issue. But in case Dan is not available would appreciate any other help you can locate. Really appreciate it! 

[dtull-adobe]

Hi Matt, I'll reach out privately. When there's only one rope file, it definitely needs to be named projectdata.rope or the project won't be openable. If it fails to open with a ref error like that when that file is present and has the correct name, I'll probably need to inspect the rope file to see what's going wrong.

[dtull-adobe]

For those following along, this turned out to be a very strange (and honestly kind of disturbing) case. I don't actually work on Character Animator day to day anymore, but try to reply when cases like this come up.

Basically what happened here is that the project file was valid at the lowest level of format validation. The rope format is only changed by appending new records and all the records in the file were valid. The problem was that there were some records and that level of invalidity isn't detected by the automatic repair mechanism. Usually automatic repair reads until it its a malformed block and truncates the file there. This generally works really well, but in this case the blocks were all valid but when it went to interpret them as a project, it failed because there were a few holes. So I found the last point in the file where the content was complete, truncated it at that offset, and then it opened fine.

I haven't actually heard back from Matt to confirm, but I think the project will work. It took me a few days to get time to dig in and understand what had gone wrong. Hopefully it wasn't too late. 😕 The disturbing part for me is that this would seem to indicate a hole in error handling or a filesystem that sometimes silently fails to flush writes. It's extremely surprising that it managed to only write valid records but not all of them. 😬

A bug like that was discovered, but it was an earlier version and was believed to be fixed.

[matt_6924]

Just following up-- Dan's fix indeed worked and I was able to open the project with his new rope file. Not too late at all-- very helpful and much appreciated! 

I work from a network drive and when the crash happened I was in a place with somewhat spotty internet. No idea if that is relevant or not, but maybe it is useful context. 

[TheOriginalGC]

Glad to hear everything worked out for you. For future reference, I have found that the program sometimes has issues when working with the cloud. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that working with local files seems to work best in the long run.