Saved progress suddenly missing!!!!!!!!!!

[ebenheizerm28787053]

I was rigging normally then open Chrome to respond to some Whatsapp messages and then when I returned to Character Animator, boom! My progress lost to a yesterday saved-file.

What the heck just happened? It's a 1 day work just disappear! Please help me!!!!!

[David Arbor · Accepted solution]

Is it possible that you accidentally went back in your history? 

The History panelwill show every change you've made in your project, unless you clear the history. Also, the top part of the panel shows saved "versions" or states of your project that you can go back to. You can create these by hitting "Cmd/Ctrl + S" or by clicking the "Save New Version" button at the bottom of the History panel.

If that top section with the different versions is empty, there's still another place to try. Click the flyout (hamburger) menu of the History panel and click "Show Auto-saved Versions." This will switch from your manually saved versions to ones Character Animator made by itself. Hopefully something here will get you back to where you need to be.

2) 

[ebenheizerm28787053]

Ahh, thank God! You saved my life man:D

I didn't know there was "Show Auto-saved Versions" in that Hamburger flyout.

Thank you so much!:D

[ebenheizerm28787053]

But I am just wondering what caused it?

[David Arbor]

Glad that worked! I usually chalk this up to user error on my part. I either hit "Undo" or clicked an old history state, or accidentally scrolled up in the History panel and click a really old state that completely borks everything. But that's the benefit of the Character Animator project file being a database. Everything is always stored. I do hit Ctrl+S when I make large changes to create that manual history state, but I also like to save new .chprojs at every major version. This collects everything into a new folder and tosses unused things, so the resulting folder is always a lot smaller. I also ZIP up al those previous versions because they sync much faster via Creative Cloud or Dropbox. Otherwise you're asking to sync literally thousands of tiny files, which really slows things down.

[ebenheizerm28787053]

Ah, I see.

Since you already talked about this, I would like to know what is really the difference of doing CTRL+S if Character Animator is always recording/saving every changes you make? What's the use of CTRL+S anyway?

[David Arbor]

Ctrl+S used to do nothing, but it would give you a number of silly messages telling you that you didn't need to save. This is a habitual behavior for many users, but as you said, it's unnecessary with a database structure. Not too long ago, the team changed this behavior to making manual versions. This is a way of giving the users control of creating their own restore point for changes or milestones that are easy to go back to vs. having to dig through the History panel to try to find a specific restore point. 

If I'm rigging a puppet I might hit Ctrl+S after I'm satisfied with the quality of my rig and then name that history state accordingly. At that point I could feel free to keep tweaking another 100 clicks or do something more destructive since I know I'll always be able to go back to my saved state at the click of a button. I could try to find my way back 100 steps in the History if I decided I didn't like what I did, or I could restore my manually save state.

[ebenheizerm28787053]

Ahh, I see. It's more like a marker to highlight the history state.

Thanks!