How to retreive a deleted animation from an object?

I have a character object, that I have deleted an animation clip from. The original file is a FBX. I have tried re-import and replacing the file in the project folder with the original. But the deleted animation does not come back.

I don’t want to throw away this asset, because I have had too much work editing the other animations and the rest of the character.

hey I ran into a similar problem with a game of mine where I deleted an animation and it nearly caused me to feel like quitting on making the game. What I did was focus on something else, something different but also important to my game. A time after I did that I still felt like I achieved some work and I eventually returned and redid my animation. I am sorry that you animation is lost, I know how it feels but I think that you should just push on and see where it takes you.

This is so unnecessary in 2021, even back in 2019 when this post was created! Such a waste, and there are so many ways to prevent it.

I’m sorry you’ve had this issue. Please consider using proper industrial-grade source control in order to guard and protect your hard-earned work.

Personally I use git (completely outside of Unity) because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up as well as free places to host your repo (BitBucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.).

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

Here’s how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

Setting up the right .gitignore file:

Generally setting Unity up (includes above .gitignore concepts):

It is only simple economics that you must expend as much effort into backing it up as you feel the work is worth in the first place.