What became of my layers

[roncurington]

Again with this Insanely stupid problem. I'm working on a file probably 12 hours in and I guess I must have hit a hotkey that opened something and I just hit enter so I could keep working.

So all of a sudden all the layers maybe 16 of them are empty. The work area is empty. Every layer has. the "eye" icon on, and the "Lock" icon off. Still the work area is nothing but he transparency Grid.

Really The English language doesn't have enough swear words to express my feelings on this. Something emptied all the layers including child layers and objects and paths. All those layer are now just empty  top level layers.

Any guess what could have done this? I didn't get a good look at the dialogue that opened. Whatever its default state was it apparently emptied everything in these layers

No doubt a lot of my difficulty is because of my eye site. I am often using the Windows Magnifier so It's beating me to death zooming in and out trying to keep up with all the things that some erroneous keystroke is causing.

When it's all said and done this is a result of Illustrator having almost every key on the keyboard designated as a hotkey. It's almost impossible to use the keyboard at all without triggering some dialogue box or web page.

[Monika Gause]

Are your objects still in the file?

[roncurington]

It appears they're gone. Any layer I select appears to be empty. As noted before all the "eye" icons are on meaning all the layers are visible.  Before this event most of the layers had child layers made up of groups, object's, paths, or compound paths.

Now there are only top level layers with nothing in them.

This happened with 1 keystroke.

When I zoom in on the layer thumbnail using "Widows Magnifier" the thumbnails appear to just be transparency grid

[Monika Gause]

Can you please post a screenshot of your complete window?

Illustrator objects don't just vanish. You have to either delete them or cut them. And usually you should notice when you delete all the objects from the file.

Have you closed the file in the meantime? Because if not, you could just go back some steps. Just try Ctrl+Z (a couple of times). You should zoom out for that, so you can see the complete workspace.

[tromboniator]

Does anything show in Outline mode? What happens with Select > All?

[ryan_edwards · Accepted solution]

My guess is you had everything selected and hit 'delete' and the dialog you saw was asking 'do you want to delete?'

That will 100% rip out the guts (your art/shapes/paths... and all the remains are the layer containers... which you mention 'top level layers'

Best way to remedy this is ... so long as you have not saved this document-state is hit 'F12' this will revert to what it was on your last save...

and moving forward in the future versioning (saving different levels of progress to desperate files can help/not be quite a huge blow if you 'lose your work' it will only be in the past 20 mins... vs 20 hours of work tied to 1 file that could accidentally get saved at any time with you 'mistake'