Error: "Couldn't Set Association for project. Check the File is writeable"

Development Getting Started & Setup
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1

Hey guys, I’m looking for help since I’ve seemingly lost my project and I don’t know what to do. I’m working on a game for class and today when I went to open my project it wasn’t appearing via the Unreal Engine Launcher. So instead I went to open it via File Explorer but got a weird popup instead of it opening like normal. It asked the version of UE5 I wanted to open alongside the project, so I selected 5.3 which was the only option, and I promptly received the error “Couldn’t set association for project. Check the file is writable.” On further introspection, the project isn’t on read only but the file size did turn in zero bytes. My project itself seems to be more or less the same from looking through the files but I’m missing any nonactor/blueprint files, like any Enums I created, my level that I created, and all my inputs. Has anyone else had this issue and is there any way to fix it or recover my project? For extra details my project was working as normal as of two days ago when I last worked on it, and additionally there was no crash or anything that happened that would have deleted any files as far as I know.

2

I’m new to UE5 so haven’t come across this issue myself, although I’d offer these thoughts:

  1. Check your recycle bin.

  2. potentially try and restore a backup or old commit, and if not - take this as an opportunity to start regular backups, or git source control.

  3. Check that your project isn’t trying to look in different locations, and also try opening your file from a different instance of UE5, or from a different disk.

  4. Look for temporary files with names like YourProjectName.tmp or YourProjectName.cache.

  5. Rebuild your project. and Check any relevant files that pull other files together.

3

  1. The recycle bin didn’t have anything since nothing was manually trashed

  2. There was no backups or commits since our network banned GitHub this year so we have no way of backing up to Online

  3. I don’t think this is the case as when I look for the files in file explorer they are straight up removed and I cannot see them anywhere. On top of that the game itself shows as only having 0 bytes so it seems like it got completely reset, but just in case how do I check where UE5 is attempting to pull the project from?

  4. Again where would these temp files be located so I could check?

  5. I can’t even find the sln file to rebuild my project in my file folder so I don’t know how to rebuild without it