Lost most of my animation frames (V 0.6.6)

[qwerty4321]

Hey, I was working on a plcx file and had just finished the lineart of a section, when I zoomed out to play what I had so far most of the first half of my project was gone. I looked it up and it seems like others have had the same exact problem, but with much older versions and while using mac rather than windows (I have a Windows 10 operating system and am currently using the most recent stable release, 0.6.6).

The thing is the empty keyframes are still there, but they don’t seem to have any drawings on them. I looked through the temp folder and 90% of the frames were missing there as well. I was already saving while working and didn’t notice the missing frames until way later, so saving as a different file and opening the old one didn’t work either.

I’ve never had this problem before using any other versions, I’ve been using pencil2D for around 2-3 years now and this hasn’t happened to me at all during that time. It was also fine for the first few weeks I used 0.6.6, but I’ve just lost a lot of work and I really hope there’s a way to recover them? I will note that I reinstalled McAfee the other day and while I was working this morning my cpu skyrocketed because of background scans, but it calmed down after a few minutes and I thought everything was fine.

Is there any way to recover anything? I’d been working on this for nearly 2 months and I don’t want to have to redo the first half, Thanks in advance :’)

[JoseMoreno]

@qwerty4321 Hi apologies for the late reply. The bug that you mention is something that I have seen in older versions actually and it was allegedly fixed in this version (as a consequence related reports stopped coming), however in this case it seems the culprit was Win 10 along the AV.

Windows 10 has a problematic behavior regarding permissions for apps that are not verified, and antivirus can become troublesome for files that are seen as modifying the system, as such the anti-virus real-time shield could have messed up the saving procedure silently at any given time and unfortunately it’s an actual danger that we have verified, even if it’s really rare to occur. To improve your use of Pencil2D under a Windows 10 environment please read this guide as well:

[Guide] How to Train Your Pencil2D (Windows)

Windows OS tends to be very jealous (particularly newer versions) of files that are not “signed” by official windows developers, since Pencil2D is an open-source project we don’t have the resources to sign the software digitally, so in general those apps tend to be blocked even if you can “normally” open the file at some point. How to download? Choosing 32 or 64 bits Unblock the ZIP file download Unzipping Pencil2D Antivirus Rules UAC Permissions Handling Run as Administrator Enable Developer …

The problem with such issue is that if you lost the files for whatever reason at some point where you didn’t notice, and you saved over the same file with the blank frames, it means you overwrote your file with new data reflecting the current behavior.

In that case I’m sorry to say that if the file was not corrupted but rather you kept saving over it in such state your drawings are simply gone

Honestly this kind of cases is why we try to frequently tell users to never save over the same file for large projects over an extended period of time, this isn’t even a Pencil2D issue but a general work habit due to murphy’s law.

One must always make extra backup copies instead of relying on a single file. I’ve had my own problems with Animate CC in this front recently, where an animator in my crew saved a humongous file collecting about 10 shots, he kept working on it, and lost 2 weeks of pro work before a due date because Animate CC spazzed and deleted all his workspace configuration and corrupted the long file, and since he didn’t take countermeasures, he had to start over again (and I had to carry his work as well to make it in time). This just goes to show that regardless of the software this kind of things do happen and we can only prepare ourselves.

That said, not all might be lost, please take a look at the guide below and look in the Experimental Recovery section. Maybe using a third party app to recover your files in the temporary folder might help, even if a bit, but you need to be quick before the files in the hard drive are overwritten (this happens automatically whether you want it or not due to how Windows manages the files in %TEMP%).

You can also look at the File Backup section to enable per-file recovery similar to macOSX Time machine feature.

While it’s not warranted to find all the images if too much time has passed, it may help recover a few of them. On the other hand please look for any extra copies you might have made before.

Pencil2D Project File Corruption Prevention / Partial Recovery Guide

If you’re just starting out with Pencil2D, the development team has been fixing a few bugs that have to do with saving and loading. Release version 0.6.5 and above should minimize these issues download it here: Download | Pencil2D Animation Table of Contents Corruption Prevention Tips a. OS Agnostic Tips Recovery Scenarios Recovery Considerations Recovery Procedure a. Windows b. MacOS Save File Verification OS File Backup & Recovery Settings Experimental Recovery Methods CORRUPTIO…

[qwerty4321]

Thank you for the reply!

I managed to find some of my frames I had exported as an image sequence a while back, I’m still missing some stuff but I think I can work with this. Still I’ll be sure to make backup copies from now on ^^

I did some digging and I think the problem came from the Tracker Remover QuickClean feature in MacAfee? I’ve turned it off now, and also got rid of its access to the temp folder, I’m hoping that this works.

I did try to exclude the folder from scans as well, but they got rid of the feature letting you exclude whole folders which means I couldn’t do much with that.

Since the files were deleted outright by MacAfee I don’t think I can get them back, but I have enough to start working on it again so thank you!

[scribblemaniac]

Glad you managed to recover some of your work.

I did some digging and I think the problem came from the Tracker Remover QuickClean feature in MacAfee? I’ve turned it off now, and also got rid of its access to the temp folder, I’m hoping that this works.

If it’s the same QuickClean described here, then the “Temporary Files” setting could absolutely cause your project to be wiped if it is run while Pencil2D is running. Deleting all temporary files while programs are active is a terrible idea in general.

We could and probably will eventually do more to detect when something like this has occurred and warn the user that the temporary directory has been wiped, but unfortunately there is no reasonable way for us to prevent privileged programs such as AVs from doing this.