Photoshop Failed to save anything for an entire 10 hour session

[NUMBER_1_AD0Br_FAN]

I was working on a project in photoshop for school. I worked on it for HOURS today. I kept saving every time I did something big (so maybe every 15-30 minutes). I would go to File-> Save. Then I was nearing the end of my project so I started saving a copy; IE "project_v1", "project_v2" etc. 

Then I made a final copy and called it "completed_project_myname". 

Then I started having an issue where files couldn't be loaded into PS (I couldn't drag a png image into photoshop or import it in any other method) so I figured it was bugging out and that it was time to restart the program. 

I went to close the program and it said something like "you have made changes to your file would you like to save them?" so I figured sure why not. I clicked yes. Then it opened the same save dialogue and I clicked through all the yes's and then I clicked save and then it closed the dialogue but photoshop wouldn't close. When I clicked close again it said the same thing "you have made changes to your file would you like to save them?" so I clicked through again. I did this about 10 times before I figured (to my great regret) that it must have saved but just be bugging out for some reason so I clicked the X again and this time I clicked "no" that I don't wan't to save my file. 

When I relaunched PS I was shocked to find that the last save file from anything was from last night. Literally NOTHING saved from this ENTIRE SESSION. NOT ONE SINGLE FILE OR COPY OR SAVE AS COPY OR EXPORT. I have been sobbing for an hour. I am going through my finals. I have 10 other courses. It is mathematically impossible for me to recover from this loss. 

My mistake (I suppose if you can say I made any mistake) was that I didn't open my file explorer to independantly verify that my file was indeed beeing updated or new files created. The thing that threw me was the fact that there was no error message or anything. I would click through the save dialogue and then click the final "save" button and then it would disappear and I figured it saved successfully. 

Now when I make a new file and save it it magically works. But all my work is gone. Because photoshop technically never crashed my recovery folder is completely empty.

I've never had anything like this happen to me before. I am absolutely destroyed. Has this happened to anybody? Is this an issue with this version of PS????

Adobe Photoshop Version: 26.4.1 20250225.r.194 4c5f14b x64

Windows 10

I honestly don't feel good even looking at the PS UI anymore. I don't feel like I can trust it. 

[Spas K.]

Hey there! Sorry to hear that happened for you. I've lost work before and I very well know how frustrating it is. I've had some very painful lessons and I've been working in a cloud folder for the past 12 years and make sure I can see it's updating upon save. But I get you that you can't always be on alert and you got no warnings for this like errors or anything else.

If I can suggest something, you can try to get a small free program called "everything" from voidtools, and try to search for your filename with it, in case something saved somewhere, as you've already checked the auto save / recovery directory. It's very thorough and quick, looks through temp, system files, directories and *everything*.

I would say that you shouldn't trust any piece of software in general, because I've had issues with all of them, Adobe or not. Sometimes it can also be Windows just deciding to update some permissions and suddenly a directory becomes write protected. I'm pretty sure I've had something similar to your case happen in the past, although I no longer remember specifics. I usually notice after saving the asterisk * stays next to the file name in the open tab in Ps or Ai and know something's up. But you would usually get some error.

[NUMBER_1_AD0Br_FAN]

Hi Spas, 

Thank you for the reply. I emailed my teacher last night when this happened and she replied to me this morning. She was very kind and understanding and has given me a very generous extension. I'm still pretty upset because I was really happy with where my project was at that point. It took a lot of tedious work that is just going to be painful to redo. 

To your point about windows updating the file permission somehow; just to test it out I made a new file and then made a new PS document saved to it, then I manually set the folder the file is in to "read only" permission and when I added some text to my PS and tried to save it it threw this error:

"Could not save 'WRITE_TEST.psd" because the file is locked, you do not have necessary access permissions, or another program is using the file. Use the 'Properties' command in the Windows Explorer to unlock the file." 

Although what happened yesterday could have been the work of space aliens for all I can prove, I really suspect that this is an issue with PS not windows. I guess that session when I started it it was just bugged or glitched. If PS was working correctly and windows was having issues I would have expected PS to throw at least some kind of error. I've fiddled around with this for half an hour this morning before class and can't get it to reproduce what happened yesterday. The only thing that's different is that yesterdays file was about 300 mb but I have 32 gb of RAM and 200 gb of free space on my C: drive where I was trying to save these files to. Again I don't think its the file size cause I've worked on files upwards of a gb before without anything like this ever happening. In fact I remember making new texture files and saving them as "texture_whatever.psd" I think I had a couple of pattern files too that I was trying to save near the end, but of course none of them saved either. Nothing I did that entire session saved at all. Then when I closed the program and re-opened it, it magically worked like normal (I didn't even restart my computer). 

About the asterisk, I think I did notice that it was on every time I looked at the file name in PS but I was working so fast that I just didn't think anything of it because I was always saving and then immidiately changed or added something. I guess I should have noticed, but I didn't even know something like this could theoretically happen. 

With regards to looking for the file, I don't really trust other programs but I did a search on my C: drive for anything with that file name with the file explorer and it came back with one hit on something unusual. Lets suppose my project was called "Project.psd"; while as I was working I was saving as versions like "Project1.psd", "Project2.psd" etc. I have 2 files with the name "Project1.psd" with a modification date and time that was from around the late evening. Both are shortcut type documents weighing 694 bytes. One is in C:/Users/MyName/Appdata/Roaming/Microsoft/Windows/Recent Items, 

and the other is in C:/Users/MyName/Recent. When I try to click on them in the explorer I get the following message: 

"The item 'Project1.psd' that this shortcut refers to has been changed or moved, so this shortcut will no longer work properly. Do you want to delete this shortcut?" 

This is really really strange. I guess one time when I tried to save the file, windows caught it and tried to make a shortcut? As far as I can tell it is literally just a link to the file on my desktop where these PS files SHOULD have been saving to but never saved. 

I'm willing to move on and put this behind me but I'm really scared of this happening again. Is there some way to verify that PS is installed correctly on my computer and that there aren't any missing files? Is there a checksum I can run on my installation or something? 

Thank you, 

[D Fosse]

It still sounds like permissions - but one other possibility, assuming you're saving to the desktop:

As far as I know, it is now possible to have your desktop in the Microsoft/Apple cloud. This is something you set up when you install the operating system (and I always make sure to avoid that). The marketing fluff is that you can then access your desktop from any unit.

If you're saving big files to the desktop, it's easy to see how that could fail.

Unfortunately, the Photoshop Save dialog will just identify "Desktop" as the save path, it doesn't give the full path. So try to save a small file to the desktop, and then look for it in Windows Explorer, under your user account. If the desktop is on your local physical drive it should look like this: