A huge chunk of my project is just completely gone as if I never worked on it beyond a certain amount of frames. Thank ABSOLUTE fuck that I draw my frames using a different program, but it still took a lot of work to arrange them just so, set up the camera frames, etc. I went into my files and confirmed the main xml file is still there, but I went into the project’s data file and all of my missing frames are missing from there too. the Main xml file also seems to reflect this.
I have no idea what could’ve happened, one day I closed my project as normal, and the next time I opened it most of it was just gone. The ONLY recent incident I can call to mind is when my computer suddenly restarted for an update and I lost what I’d been working on for the past hour. I tried to recover it by opening my temp files, but each one I opened just led me back to the current version I ended up with after the crash (just that hour’s work lost). I accepted the defeat and saved and closed what I still had. It would make perfect sense if only the progress I lost in the restart mishap was missing, but DAYS and days worth of work is gone, WAY more than I left the project off with. Further more I’m almost certain this isn’t even the first time I’ve opened and worked on the project since that incident, and everything was just fine then.
Is there anything at all I can do? I tried compressing the files into zip and re-opening them that way, and I tried updating to the latest version. If there’s nothing I can do, can you at least try and help me figure out what the hell even happened? I want an explanation.
Edit: I have a habit of exporting my projects as mp4’s periodically to check how they look in practice. Interestingly, the latest and only mp4 file I have is exactly the partial version of my pencil 2d file. That could just be a coincidence, I’m not sure if I exported the project after that point in the first place, but I wanted to share just in case it means something.
Honestly from your description, it’s hard to say what exactly happened, but here are some ideas:
Pencil2D by default saves session work in the temporary files directory.
Windows update either messed up with the Pencil2D crash recovery or had a post-update temporary files cleaning policy enabled.
When you tried to open the file from temp it worked because Pencil2d couldn’t process it, so it was safe. Once you opened it, the temp files were deleted, and all the frames were in RAM, but not on DISK (they were deleted by windows)
When you saved the file, it saved the “location” (in the xml) by the actual images were NOT there.
This seems similar to what a few other people had happen in the past with 0.6.6, and Win Update only helped trigger the bug.
My personal advice, is to use the “legacy” file type. *.pcl when using Save As… functionality.
This will ensure the files are NOT saved ever in the temp folder, but rather in a folder next to your project file. The downside is that you won’t have a single file in your hard drive but a project folder with all the images and stuff (basically the same elements found in temp)
The other downside, is that the crash recovery might not work (I’m not sure so I’ll need to ask a dev)
For the other part, honestly I’m glad you draw on a different app, at least you can rebuild.
As for tips, If you name an exported drawing something like “MyImage_050.png” and then import it into Pencil2D using File > Import > Image Predefined Set command, Pencil2D will import the image exactly on the 50th frame of your current project file.
So if you export all your drawings like character-name_frame###.png each character sequence will be imported as a layer with the name and frame(s) in the position(s) you need.
If I can think of something else to help, I’ll let you know.
I’m sorry to hear about your issues as well. @JoseMoreno has covered some of the most likely explanations of what happened. It sounds like you’ve already exhausted the recovery procedures, and unfortunately if that data isn’t in the project file or the temporary directory, it can’t be recovered. I just wanted to add a few things to what you can do going forward.
First make sure you are using the most up-to-date version of Pencil2D. v0.7.0 was released recently, and seeing that you’ve been a user here for a while it’s possible that you are still using a older version, which will be more likely to corrupt files. I’m not going to say that we’ve eliminated all possible ways a project can become corrupted, but we’ve done some work to reduce the possibility of this happening and improve the recovery experience in the event it does occur.
Secondly, make backups of your projects. If you don’t have any full system backup in place, at least make regular copies of your project or use Save As to save to a different name so that if something like this does occur again, you’ll be able to use the latest uncorrupted backup and limit the amount of work lost.
Finally, a note concerning the .pcl project format. While the format may reduce the risk of some types of corruption and I’m not going to say don’t use it, I am not personally a big fan of it as it is more prone to user error. You will need to take extra care that you do not modify the .pcl.data directory, and that it maintains the same name and parent directory as your .pcl file, otherwise you could inadvertently make it unopenable. Also, you will need to backup both the .pcl file and the .pcl.data directory for your backups to be valid projects.