Unreal Engine (4.24) deleted all my Materials!!!

…I have two levels and the materials that I used in the first level got deleted after working in the second level. No material left of this first level eventhough they were inside 7 different folders.

How can this be and any tips to restore them?

I am using Windows and nothing in the trash bin.

What I remember is that I sometimes renamed folders. The old folder names often still showed up in unreal next to renamed ones and I of course deleted them so that they are out of my sight. For sure everything still worked fine after that deletion for quite some time until now (2 days later). I simply started to work on a second level and just noticed that the materials of the first level are gone.

The materials were pretty big and I worked a whole day on them.

Thanks for any advice

Are you renaming and deleting stuff from within the Editor, or from the Window’s FileExplorer? If you do everything from within the Editor it should rework all the references etc and you will get a window appear if there are conflicts (i.e. if you are trying to delete an asset that is referenced in a scene). If you’ve done this in Windows i fear it might be a lost.

Do you have a backup of the project?

Could be that the .uasset files are still present but corrupted in some ways. Check from explorer to see if they exist or not.

Thanks guys for the answers. I just recreated everything. Next time I make sure to have some kind of backup.

Hey MRC, check out using source control. It’s made just for situations like this. There are some live trainings if you prefer Youtubeing it.