GitHub deletes my files

Development Programming & Scripting
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1

I’m pretty new to version control systems and I’ve been using GitHub for 3 months with the help of GitHub Desktop. Everything was working fine until now, I can’t figure out how to download my project.

While I was using GitHub, I didn’t need to download anything, I would just revert or discard changes, without any need to download the files. Recently I wanted to download my project and check if everything was working fine, but after I download it as a .zip file and unpack it, Unreal rebuilds some missing modules, it opens up correctly, but I get a few errors saying “Failed to find ”. Also the engine fails to find the .umap file of the main map I’ve been using, the error reads “Failed to load map! appears to be an asset file”.

I tried to fix it myself and I found out the files save correctly to GitHub, I compared every single file that was giving an error to what was saved on GitHub, I even compared the size of the individual files and everything matched (I compared files which were in my original project which I did not download, this copy was on my disk from the very beginning and it works fine). I also checked the size of the files I downloaded, it turned out that all the files that cause the error are just 1 KB…

Here are some of the files which I’ve compared:

GitError
GitError1074×609 48.2 KB

Is there a way to download the project without compression? If I was to hazard a guess, I would say zip is the one who’s guilty here since when I download raw files, their size is correct (I opened GasStationMap.umap on GitHub and clicked “Download Raw File”, then I checked the file in the Downloads folder, the size was 831 KB, which was correct)

2

It still doesn’t fix my problem, but I’ve found a way around it. If anyone is having the same issue, it is indeed the download process which messes up the files, therefore avoid downloading the zip.

What I did was to remove the entire project from my computer (moving it to the Recycle Bin or to any location which is different from the initial location is enough, no need to get rid of it entirely), then I opened GitHub Desktop, it threw an error saying that it can’t find the repository on my computer, then three buttons showed up, one reading “Clone repository”, one more reading “Remove” and another one for finding the new location of the repository. Go for the first one. Now GitHub Desktop will try to download the project for you and it will place it in the original location (the location where you moved your original copy from). The whole process is quite long, but it’s worth it, this way all the files are downloaded correctly, there are no errors nor missing files, Unreal doesn’t say my .umap is an asset anymore!