i got myself a huge problem and i hope someone can be able to help me with it.
yesterday i made a clone of a project in which i put all content and all content projects i have together (basically every asset i have).
i made a very cool scene in that and i am very happy about that.
but today when i wanted to continue, it wasnt showing up ANYWHERE… :mad:
i tried looking in windows explorer and even with programs like recuva. but the project had just completely vanished from my pc.
any help would be very much appreciated. and before you ask the question, yes i saved it.
pc. specs if needed:
CPU: intel i5 (not the best but it gets the job done)
MOBO: custom from computer manufacturer
RAM: 16GB
GPU: Nvidia GTX 960 4GB
STORAGE: HDD
i really wanna get this project back. and i shall not use this pc much more to prevent data loss by overwriting my HDD.
so again, any and all help shall be very much appreciated.
This happened to me when I first started using Ue4, all my projects vanished. I had to say goodbye to my projects but the good thing was that those were just projects for learning so I didn’t lose much.
Do backups! Then do backups of backups ie. copy your backups to at least 2 different locations.
My backup routine is this:
after every major change (or at end of every day), i zip whole project, and give it descriptive name. for eg. 11_11_2916_My_Gaem_added_pad_support.zip , ie. i add biggest feature that i implemented that day. This makes easy to find backups that have something that i removed but i want again. Also date helps with sorting backups, do not rely on windows date, it is often updated to time you copy file over.
then i copy that zip file to 2 different folders on 2 different harddrives, in my dev PC. HDD space is cheap, so no excuses here.
then i copy that backup to 2 separate usb drives, that are usually disconnected, one of them uses Truecrypt Volume. Why truecrypt volume? Because it cannot be altered unless i mount it.
then i copy that backup next working day to my PC at work, luckily i have plenty HDD space there.
Reasons for multiple backups:
i like to clean up my harddrives from junk, few times i cleared stuff a bit too far. Reinstalling windows may ruin your C drive, or in case you have dual boot (with linux) windows may happily fix other UNRECOGNIZED hdds just for fun.
ransomware, this **** loves to encrypt your hdd, so keeping offline copies is vital.
your home can be robbed, so keeping offsite backups may save you year of work.
Year (or years) of work is worth much more than some PC.
Now I do almost the same thing as you do but I upload my backups to a cloud storage and of course store the copy of the project on another hard drive.
I am not that lucky to lose both hard drives at the same time, I hope…
so theres no possible way to recover this project?, it was quite a big and important project…
and it is only one out of all. not all at once.
and if i were to backup my projects in the future in the cloud, which cloud service do you recommend because not many cloud services have a lot of storage in their free versions…
Look into your Recycle Bin, maybe the folder is there?
Google cloud is free has 8 GB storage, or use a Perforce source control system (more professional and pretty needed when working with a team 2 or 5 GB free with Helix beta, not sure about current offers)
no, i’ve looked in recycle bin and there is nothing to be found.
another thing i find odd is that the project only dissapeared after restarting my pc.
could it possibly be that it didnt save completely???
and not sure about this but is there a recovery option from the auto-saves from unreal???
To me the best way is to run a task that will copy and zip (optional) your project to an external drive. Cloud is nice too but it can be slow when you have large assets.
:mad: