@Sum_Cynical_Animator Hi welcome to the forum. Sorry to hear this had happened to you. If you’re using Windows 10, there are a few extra steps you need to help prevent this happening less in the future.
- Please read this to setup your Windows environment to run thirdparty apps with minimal interruption form the operating system [Guide] How to Train Your Pencil2D (Windows)
- Now please read this guide to help you learn about prevention tips as well as potential recovery steps. Bear in mind that depending on the damage it may be impossible to recover all the file, but there’s still hope Pencil2D Project File Corruption Prevention / Partial Recovery Guide
- While it may be obvious for some, we’ve had users saving files incorrectly, so here’s a small tip: Pencil2D projects are always to be saved with a PCL or PCLX file extension, if you saved the file with any other format you may not be able to open it. For example if you exported as an mp4 file, this is a video format that will not be editable.
- Lastly make always sure to save various copies of a working file through the lifetime of your project. That way you can ensure that you won’t lose work regardless of software. Pencil2D is not the only software that can suffer from loss of data, I’ve had personal experiences with Adobe Animate CC and Toonboom Harmony to name a few. But the worst part is that the latter were paid software
I hope you can recover at least part of your work.