I’m getting an error when I tried to save my animation. It says “An error has occurred and your file may not have saved successfully.” The pop-up gave me some technical information I don’t understand (provided below) and I’m wanting to know how I can fix this problem. I don’t want to lost several hours worth of progress on this animation.
~Melody
Error Display
Title:
Description:
System Info
Pencil version: 0.5.4
Build ABI: x86_64-little_endian-llp64
Kernel: winnt 10.0.16299
Product name: Windows 10 (10.0)
@MelodyAnimations I’ll tag a developer here, but again please upload the file to a file sharing service you trust in order to link it here so they can take a look at it and help you out.
@chchwy Please take a look at this issue where an error pop-up has appeared.
I’m afraid I can’t upload the file to this site. I tried turning my PCLX animation file into a JPEG and GIF file, but site I used said the file was too big to convert (It’s 30,708 KB). Is there some way I can make the file smaller to convert it, or what?
@MelodyAnimations Please don’t try to convert the pclx file, it’s not how these file work. PCLX files are basically zip files already.
Try to upload it to google drive, dropbox, mega.nz, or a similar free service and share the link here.
OK, I uploaded the file to Google Docs. Please tell me if you need anything else.
Link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cMP_TsCV1U2GzzZNxhkmkZXBAUCC8S1N/view?usp=sharing
@MelodyAnimations I’ll take a look meanwhile we wait for a developer to review the file as they know better what can be done in these cases.
Normally, the drawings should be safe, but if the main file got jumble it might be a bit hard to put it back together, so you might not have to draw everything again, but you might have to put it back in place again, because normally Pencil2D stores the raw drawings and then uses coordinates from the main file to place the drawings on each layer and on each frame.
@MelodyAnimations Ok, I got back. So yeah, all the drawings, the songs and the text are there, but then then main file vanished (according to some reports this is already known and they are working to fix this problem since people get troubled by this from blackouts, restarting their pcs or kicking their power cables abruptly)
Each drawing has a numbered name that indicates the layer number it belonged to, and the frame it was assigned to previously e.g 003.677 (layer 3, frame 677)
So it’s relatively easy to reconstruct the animation, but basically you have to import each image separately and roughly place it on it’s respective frame as similar as you can recall the previous file, since the position data was lost. This might be annoying but at least you don’t have to re-draw everything.
IF you use Windows, there is faint hope to find an older version of your animation inside the %TEMP% folder for the Operating System:
Inside the temp files folder > find the Pencil2D folder > then look for the name of your file. Inside it’s possible you find an .XML file. If you do you might be spared from importing all the files, but this is not always the case for most of these issues so be sure to look into it.
With that said, I honestly advice to save incremental files every time there is a major change. From a professional perspective leaving all the work data in a single file is bad practice and it calls for issues like this where you can’t fall back to a previous revision. If we have a previous version file we could at least help to position the drawings that weren’t drawn at the time, instead of the whole animation.
I’ll link the zipped data folder here so you can download it back:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1uPnNNiUiLIR0nYSD99dILvk5TeUH3LiE
Perfect! That did the trick. I have everything except the parts I worked on while that weird saving error, but it was only 2 scenes so I’m not set too far back. Thank you so much JoseMoreno. You are the best! 
@MelodyAnimations Sorry we can’t help further to reconstruct the files. We are already talking about ways to avoid such issues so hopefully in the future there will be a way to recover the files as painlessly as possible. For now, please remind yourself of saving extra backup copies to avoid most problems and if you need further help let us know we’ll try our best 
The reconstruction actually wasn’t that bad, but I appreciate your concern. Sorry if this was an inconvenience, but I’m glad I could help save others from the same fate. Have a wonderful day.
~ Melody