4.12.5 project corrupt how to recover?

This is the second time I’ve had a project get corrupted for no reason whatever with v4.12.5, the last time once I updated to 4.15 and imported the project in it converted it to a 4.15 version and it worked fine?

Now 4.12 crashes when i open the project in question.

I’m a bit scared to do this again as I’ve got some pretty important projects in my current v4.15 folders and don’t want to corrupt these and making that version of the editor to crash.

Is there any way to recover my 4.12 project?

In my experience, corruption is largely caused by Blueprint-defined Structures that are heavily used in Blueprints. To find out which Blueprint is causing the crash, you should rename or temporarily move the default startup map, so that it does not load and cause a crash when you start the project, then look through Blueprints that are used in that map, to see which one is causing a crash upon load. If you have your autosaves located in your project’s Saved folder, you can replace the faulty Blueprint from an autosave. I suggest you use version control software in the future as a way to recover your project from an older, working submission, should corruption ever happen again.

Thanks for that but I’d like to ask:

How do I access the start up map if the project won’t open and instead crashes before I can get the editor up?

Forgive me for sounding dumb, but What is version control and how do I use this?

I appreciate the help massively btw

You don’t need or want to access the startup map right now, I mean that you want to rename or move the startup map inside of Windows Explorer, so that the engine cannot find it to open it up. You can also change the startup map inside one of the project config files.

Version control is software that helps teams collaborate on projects, but can also be used as a safety measure. You can submit your files to the version control software, and it will save that version of the file somewhere. Anytime you need to, you can revert files to older versions, compare versions, etc.

Another way to find out what’s causing the crash is to look in the Project/Saved/Logs folder.

cheers guys, i really appreciate that and will give it a shot