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New Participant
July 25, 2022
Question

all my projects disappeared

  • July 25, 2022
  • 9 replies
  • 9518 views

i opened premiere pro today and all my projects that i have are not there anymore. ive checked files and i just cant find anything! i have put in hours and hours of time into some of these projects so i need some help!

9 replies

jorgea59391302
New Participant
October 18, 2025

SAME. EXACT. THING.

 

The project has dissapeared. All other projects and auto saves remain in the usual folder.

 

THE PROJECT I WAS WORKING ON..... GONE!

 

THIS IS AS ABSOLUTELY INSANE.

 

MORE THAN 200 HOURS OF WORK.

 

WTF??!! @ADOBE

Community Expert
October 18, 2025

@jorgea59391302 

 

Open the most recent auto-save and then do file Save As to save it as your current project.  

Assuming your Premiere Pro Auto Save is set to the dedault increment, you should only have to redo the last 15 minutes of work.


For important projects, I either schedule the folder with the projects files to be cloned to a backup nightly or manually copy the current project files to a USB Flash drive or upload it to cloud storage.  

New Participant
September 30, 2025

Same here, yesterday some of my video files on timeline went grey striked (but I was tired and thought I would deal with it today and well today I don't have anything to deal with, *.prproj files on my pc gone, all :DD wow..

New Participant
September 30, 2025

Files deleted a month ago are still scrapable from the recycle bin, but the working files from yesterday are gone :)) 

 

 

MyerPj
Community Expert
September 30, 2025

So it's a Windows machine. What things transpired since yesterday? Is your disk suspect? (if so, do not Write anything to the disk). Give us some clues. AFAIK: the files only get into the Recycle bin by deleting them, so you must have deleted some.

New Participant
October 17, 2024

I have same thing happend today, my entire project file disappeared, suddenly

MyerPj
Community Expert
October 17, 2024

So it's listed on the home screen but when you click to open it, it's gone?

Nothing is listed on the home screen?

You've searched your drive(S) and not found any *.prproj files?

mikalg40805514
New Participant
February 9, 2024

Having the same issue. I've been working on a project that was saving to my auto saves folder and today I opened up Premeire, it shows different project options as my Recents and none of those files are in my recent saves anymore. I know there's a community expert in here claiming that Premiere can't delete files but that seems to be what's going on here

Averdahl
Community Expert
February 9, 2024
quote

Having the same issue. I've been working on a project that was saving to my auto saves folder and today I opened up Premeire, it shows different project options as my Recents and none of those files are in my recent saves anymore. I know there's a community expert in here claiming that Premiere can't delete files but that seems to be what's going on here


By @mikalg40805514

 

Do you by any chance use OneDrive and have stored all your projects/media in the Documents folder located on the C-drive, iow in the folder Premiere Pro suggests as default?

 

I use OneDrive and have noticed that when configuring OneDrive with the default settings, the Documents folder is one of the folder being backed up. If one then decide to uncheck those folders for backup, files are removed, including the Adobe folder.

 

Next restart of Premiere Pro it seems that the Preferences has been reset since the preferences file has been deleted, not by Premiere Pro but by OneDrive.

 

It seems that the user BYPhoto has a similar experience, in this case it was iCloud.

 

I think this is the issue that many users have been reporting for a long time now. It seems to be related to cloud storage solutions. The common thing is that they use a cloud solution, save all files in the Documents folder and then the cloud solution, for some yet unknown reason, decides to do a little cleanup and boom, all files are gone without asking the user anything.

 

Adobe should adress this asap and stop defaulting to those folders out of the box since it causes serious issues for users.

 

 

 

Community Expert
February 9, 2024

Premiere Pro defaults to the Documents folder in the local user's folder.

 

To troubleshoot this issue, try saving a Word document (or Notepad file) and a Photoshop document to the same location as a Premiere Pro project and monitor what does or does not remain in that location.

 

 

BYPhoto
New Participant
February 6, 2024

I'm a bit late to the party here, but the same thing happened to me. A possible solution - The folder containing hundreds of my historical project files had been moved to iCloud when I prompted iCloud to sync my desktop and document folders. Just point Premiere Pro to that folder, and everything will be available hopefully.

New Participant
September 1, 2022

Yesterday, I discovered the same issue.  All of my project files for the last 3 months vanished along with all backup files.  Thankfully, no media source files were missing. I have been using premiere for 20 years, and I have never had this issue before.  There is no trace of these files anywhere.  They don't show in the recents folder, and the backup folder is empty.  This is both unexplainable and inexcusable.  Yes, I did look where I saved the project - and in every single folder on my drive. They are gone.  I guess I will try to learn FCP. 

MarekMularczyk
Community Expert
September 5, 2022

Where did you save the project files which disappeared?

Did you find anything in your OS bin?

 

Adobe Community ExpertAdobe Certified Professional
Known Participant
October 14, 2024

The project files that were saved on your external ssd, you're saying they're gone, right?

That's odd. Someone must have deleted them as Premiere can't delete a project file... 😉

 


This was a poor answer.

Peru Bob
Community Expert
July 25, 2022

Did you save them to an external hard drive that is not connected or doesn't have a fixed drive letter?

MarekMularczyk
Community Expert
July 25, 2022

Check the location where you saved your projects. If they're not there (.prproj files) then there's nothing Premiere can do about it. Your projects will be saved wherever you saved them. Premiere just opens them for you when you load .prproj.

 

Adobe Community ExpertAdobe Certified Professional
MarekMularczyk
Community Expert
July 25, 2022

Hi,

Are you saying that all your project files (.prproj) disappeared from your hard drive?

 

Adobe Community ExpertAdobe Certified Professional