@tuppo Hi. Sorry to hear you had this experience. It is always rough to lose progress.
First of all try opening the most recent actual file you have that’s different from the “recovered” file (which I hope you saved separately). From there if it opens or not you can take a choice from what i’m about to write.
Now If i’m reading correctly, If you never saved until before the crash, and the animation “last state” was loaded directly from the working folder (temp folder) as opened by the recovery feature, and this is exactly the same as the actual original file you had before, I’m afraid we can’t do much since there is simply no way to recover image or frame information that was not written to a file or to the disk.
It is possible that there’s still some of the additional work information from your session was kept in the Temporary file directory, so you can try to look for that. Please follow our partial recovery guide, section 4
However this procedure is roughly the same thing that Pencil2D did when you “restored progress” by confirming the pop-up window. If that’s the only thing it recovered I’m afraid that’s as far that can be recovered in that instance.
Now, if your file crashed and for some reason you CAN’T open the file itself directly, you can try to force open the saved file itself and spill its contents.
For this you’ll have to follow a similar recovery procedure as outlined above, however in this case you will need to extract the internal files as mentioned in section 5 “Save File Verification” and reimport whatever information it has in order to reconstruct your file from there.
When files don’t open due to crashing or corruption, It is usual that the information about where each image is positioned on the canvas, where it’s placed on the timeline and timed out, is probably lost (if you see an main.xml file intact you should be able to recover more stuff).
As a last comment FYI Pencil2D has an autosave feature, please enable it in Edit > Preferences > Files section however know this only saves the progress to an existing file. It does not create automatic separate backups (yet).
We always recommend for users to create their own versioned backups to avoid getting their files corrupted due to crashes, blackouts or any other situation that can damage a normal computer file.