External Hard Drive not Properly Transferring Files

Development Platform & Builds
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1

Hi, so I’ve been working off of an external hard drive, moving it from my desktop to my laptop, and up until now everything has worked just fine. However as soon as I move the Drive from one computer to another there are files that just don’t work anymore, even files that I made on the computer that they don’t work on anymore. Then as soon as I move the drive to the previous computer everything works fine again. So none of the files have been deleted, I just can’t access them on the other computer.

When I say it doesn’t work there are two primary things that happen.

  1. When I open the project file I get the message “Failed to open map file. This is most likely because the map was saved on a newer version of the engine” (I checked and everything is up to date) When it loads, everything loads in as black, and the map file is gone

  2. Whenever I right click on an asset that doesn’t work, I can tell because it shows the default picture of the asset, it says with a little popup in the bottom right-hand corner “Failed to load asset”

EDIT:
I would prefer my files to be on my desktop, but this is currently where it is having the most issues. Is there any way at the very least I could get everything to work on my desktop alone. (This is not ideal, but this is what I need the most for right now, as UE4 has a rather consistent problem of maxing out all of my GPU on my laptop and crashing)

2

I fixed it!

So what I did actually fixed two of my problems!

First was this problem,
The other was the fact that my hard drive could not be disconnected while my computer was still on (Yes I tried closing everything in task manager and clicking eject drive)

Whenever I would exit UE4 I would save everything and press the red X at the top right-hand corner
NEVER DO THIS! It caused these problems for me because it seems that unless UE4 closes on its own terms it appears that it is going to keep processes running in the background, it is going to keep data from being properly sealed up. But as soon as I went to File->Exit everything worked perfectly.

NOTE:
To restore any of the files you “Lost”, you have to open the asset in UE4 on the computer in which they work. Here is the weird, specific and picky part. You HAVE to switch over to the viewport with blueprints and save (I did “CTRL-S”) so that you see a loading bar. If you did not see a loading bar it didn’t work- I do not know about anything other than blueprint, however. Then exit UE4 and when you move the drive back it should work.