Photoshop Animation File Corrupt - Black Screen Red Lines

This is a complaint for Adobe, and a warning to Photoshop animators.

I animate with Photoshop professionally. I had spent weeks on a shot in Photoshop with hundreds and hundreds of frames. Today I opened the file and it was flattened to a single black background layer with red lines dashed across the canvas. There's nothing in the AutoRecover folder.

This is the second time this has happened on a shot that I've put dozens (probably 100+) of hours into, during a time crunch.

I understand Photoshop isn't for animation, and I was putting a heavy load on the program. But I've worked on heavy files before with no problem aside from having to save as a .PSD when I exceed the 2 gb limit.

I have been getting disk cache errors. However, I have been diligent about clearing the cache regularly, and freeing up space on my C: drive. I believe I had ~40 GB free when this occurred. I have 16 GB RAM for context.

I suspect this happened because my computer went to sleep / shut down when Photoshop was open, (and maybe the disc cache was too full to autosave on its own, but 40 GB of free space should be plenty!)

I also think I should have saved it as a .PSB, and maybe that would have helped but who knows!

My chief complaint is that Photoshop ought to have a better autosave feature, akin to Premiere and After Effects, not just Autorecover. My Auto Recovery is set to every 10 minutes, but whenever I need it the folder is empty.

I called Adobe Customer Service and told them about this, and they basically told me that "Photoshop is a heavy program" and that animation is a heavy workflow for Photoshop.

I would be surprised if there's a way to recover my work at this point. Really considering switching to ToonBoom or Krita now! 😄

Has anyone else encountered a similar issue?