Hi, I am working on a project with Unreal Engine 5. I had a pretty big project, and my pc was acting up, so I decided to factory reset it, so I lost all the files. But it turns out that I thought that the project was saved in the cloud in the library part of Epic Games Launcher, so I decided not to backup due to the size of the project and I trusted. But it turns out that when I log into my account with the pc already reset, my projects don’t show up. I’ve been working for months on this, so I don’t want to lose my documents, thanks.
Hey there @MiniBicho7SIU! Sorry to hear you’ve lost your projects! The Epic Games launcher doesn’t store your Unreal Projects on the cloud, as version control usually handled by the developer on a per project basis. When you factory reset, there is chance you can recover some data but you’d need a data recovery tool, and it may not be able to retrieve everything.
Do you know any data recovery tool? Thanks bro.
I haven’t had to use any myself so I don’t have any recommendations directly. Some examples are Recuva or DiskDrill to name a few, but I have no idea which are the most effective.
From what I gathered from a quick search is that Recuva is free but owned by Piriform/Ccleaner and hasn’t been updated in a while, which shouldn’t pose a problem but not my area of expertise.
I see lots of marketing for DiskDrill but it seems to only have a trial for 500mb recovery then it’s got to be paid, so the trial wouldn’t be able to recover your whole project most likely.
Though, all I know of each software are their names and quick overviews. I do recommend doing research on each of them to verify they fit your needs. Be careful selecting a good program as with anything that deals with storage handling, or any application on the web.
Actualization: Hi bro, I found in recuva ALL my projects minus the one I am looking for, I am really desesperated because it is 2 months of a game I was going to put in steam and I was finishing it, thanks tho bro for your help and support…
If you have done a factory restore on your PC, it’s likely that all of your files are gone. You could send in your drives to a file recovery company, but it’s unlikely that they can recover them, especially if you initialized the factory restore.
The Unreal Engine launcher doesn’t store your project on the cloud. All of the files are locally stored on your PC. I highly suggest that you in the future use something like Perforce to handle version control and storage.
Ahhh I’m sorry the other project is missing! When you factory reset, all the data on the drive is basically flagged as irrelevant but isn’t outright destroyed. It just gets replaced when you put new data on it. In this case, that storage location must have been selected when you were reinstalling the programs you’d needed and it likely unrecoverable.
To mirror Elias’ response, you could try a data recovery specialist to see if they have more tricks up their sleeve for recovering data, but it’s most likely gone. If at all possible, in the future I’d recommend using Git/Github or Perforce to back up and handle version control for your projects. This way you can rest easy knowing there’s an offsite backup in case something else goes wrong in the future.