I was using the built-in grid/palette system, I was trying to do something, messed it up, now my entire scene got messed up. I was like “its ok, I can just undo it”, well, Unity decided to automatically close on me, and guess what? The engine saves without you saving it, so after coming back into Unity, I couldn’t undo it.
No way to load up a previous save from earlier in the day or previous day. Pretty sad you cant yet you could do that with some games back in the 90s.
Would be nice if Unity only saves after we manually save it so stuff like that can’t happen.
its not coding. its within the GUI itself. And to make matters worse, I lost my palette. Since i still have all of my code, if I really wanted to, I can just start over with making the scene again…but thats just a waste of time.
it’s part of the work, six years a go, my HD crashed and i’m not telling my friends or co-workers, “you must not use a hard disk” or “dont’ buy WD hard drives”.
It’s hilarious that I saw a “Unity needs to auto save” post maybe 3 weeks ago, and now I’m seeing a “Unity shouldn’t auto save” post.
Sounds like you just need to accept you messed up and not blame the engine. As everyone else has mentioned, source control exists for situations like this.
nothing in software is trustworthy, all this stuff is created by people who are obviously total morons, so you just got to do it. I’m sure these issues you are having aren’t related to your workflow so let’s not even consider that, but definitely set up the source control because then you can just get back to the work in a few minutes every time the engine fails.
Congratulations. You’ve achieved what virtually everyone who has ever used a computer has achieved. You’ve lost data due to a failure to back it up properly. Failure to back up your data will always eventually lead to data loss. If it wasn’t Unity it would have been something else.
Now that you’ve experienced failure it’s time to learn from that failure and start backing up your projects. Version control is the recommended way to properly back up source code and Git is one popular way to do it.
I did a quick search, it seems this mistake of not having version control is so common, that there are thousands of memes.
In fact it bailed me out this morning as I’d made some changes and screwed my rendering up. I couldn’t for the life of me recall where or how. But not to worry. I use source/version control.
Life is much easier when I don’t even have to back up.
I know I’m just piling on, but source control isn’t just for code. Using source control has been the software industry standard since as long as I can remember. If you had been using source control, the worst case scenario is losing only the work done since the last check in, and you’d be back working within a few minutes.
If you don’t want to do source control either do frequent backups manually (just make a zip file of your project folder and copy it off your computer), or just accept the risk that you will lose some of your work at some point or another. The same kind of thing can happen with any dev tool, from Photoshop, to Premiere, to UE4, etc.
A couple months ago I was working on a song demo in a DAW. I’d nearly gotten it finished when it stopped saving, and I tried to overwrite a save and it totally messed up. I had to completely remake it. It was my fault for trying to force an overwrite when it wasn’t saving, but source control would have saved me from having to remake it completely.
Everyone is spot on. This is just a natural part of developing content in general. I personally would’ve liked an autosave feature back when I was using the engine heavily, but autosave /no-autosave doesn’t really solve the underlying problem.
Though I have almost messed up my LFS source in the past, so it’s not bulletproof.
Never thought to use it for music too. I should keep that in mind.
Long time ago I was looking through drawing tutorial videos and there was some sort of art training school that has this training exercise.
The instructor asks trainee to make a rough digital painting. It takes (at least) an hour or two, I believe.
The trainee brings in the painting, the instructor looks through it and then…
Erases half of it and saves it over. Then asks the trainee to do it again or fix it.
I do not recall what their reasoning was, it was something along the lines of “not getting too attached to the results so it won’t make you blind to your mistakes”.
However, massive data loss is something that occasioanlly occurs. Normally if you did something once you can do it again, but going through the motions again is not very entertaining.
I went to my sprite editor, I tried to slice an image, then something messed up along the way and it brought my entire asset from the Project section and onto my canvas and replaced everything I had on there.
I would have just simply hit undo, but Unity decided to randomly close on me after.
That happens in all leading game engines. Source control is not optional. It’s unfortunately never going to be 100% stable. We know this after decades of work on different engines. Just a thing to live with, so we all use version control. For extra stability, don’t use betas.
Lost work happens to all devs once, then never again. I wish it was a case where Unity would be 100% stable but for that to happen, Unity would have to be capable of doing a lot less.
Yeah, I actually did wind up changing a couple things so in the end it may have helped some. But those first few moments of realization that I’d have to redo the work were painful.
