Unreal Engine 4 Deleted all my Desktop folders and files

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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1

What’s more likely:

  • you accidentally deleted the files yourself
  • the engine chose you specifically and maliciously and irreversibly deleted some of your files

The engine crashing, locking the system and the OS being unable to correctly recover files, corrupting them in the process is quite plausible. What you’ve described is not.

Around an entire years worth of
progress gone, and no way of getting
it back.

We all lost files at some point, one way or another. Backup important stuff. Always, no excuses.

2

Last night I was going through my project files within the Epic Games launcher on my Mac Laptop, deleting any unwanted projects and whatnot. When I was finished, however, I tabbed back to my Desktop and noticed the files and folders I had stored there were gone. All of them, including backups for my games, actual packages for them, school documents, scripts, and even actual software I stored there got zapped. Around an entire years worth of progress gone, and no way of getting it back. I’ve given up at this point, as none of the data retriever applications I’ve tried have been useful.

My question here is, why is this happened? What caused UE4 to corrupt my files to the point that they were removed from my Laptop entirely? Epic Staff, if you guys are reading this, please fix this, as it’s a major issue!

3

I think you could manage this if you stored one of your project files on your desktop.

If the actual project file was on the desktop, when you delete it from the launcher, everything would have gone with it.

4

I’m pretty sure that’s what happened, yes.

5

I’ve just tested it out of sheer curiosity. The engine deletes the project folder and all files inside the project folder but it does not keep track of what’s outside of that folder, neither does it touch any files that you moved outside of the folder. That’s unless the most recent Epic vs Apple changed that :wink:

If you put your homework inside the project folder, then you’ll have it deleted, sure. But why would you that? If you somehow managed to make your desktop the project folder, then I am lost for words here :expressionless: