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!