I’m getting critical errors and I have a project due very soon, so it’s an urgent request for help, if anyone has any knowledge on this. I can’t simply submit a bug report since that may take many months to fix.
I looked around the forum and known issues but can’t find this anywhere. Basically, my project worked fine until today. When I opened it up I got a bunch of missing prefabs and component references (showing red in scene). I had not changed any paths, didn’t move any prefabs or folders around. In fact, I had just cloned the repository from GitLab. I checked the folders where I stored all my prefabs and they were all there. I checked the folders where all my sprites, scripts and other assets that unity claimed missing were and they were there too. So I don’t get how they’re missing even when I can see them right there in the folder where they’ve always been.
When I selected one of those prefabs though, it had missing component references such as scripts and sprites. Example:
Here the transform, rigidbody and colliders are kept but the scripts and all sprites are missing. Although the sprite or script locations have not changed.
Example screenshot of all errors:
Some extra context: yesterday I had issues with Unity being very slow and crashing due to limited HDD space on my device. I had 20 GB free space when I started working and a few hours later it all filled up and I couldn’t even save some script changes. The reason for this also eludes me, since I did not add any new assets in those hours. I have no idea how 20 GBs can disappear into thin air while just working in the editor.
The device I am using is not ideal but I have no choice. I cleared up as much space as I could but it still wasn’t enough. So I copied the project to an external HDD and tried to run it from there instead. I deleted the project from local drive (it was around 50 GB).
Trying to run the editor from external HDD was extremely slow. Any change I made took 30 seconds or more to apply. Even just changing some position or name of an object. Then Unity crashed again.
So today I decided to try running the project from local drive again, starting with a fresh clone of the repository. Then this happened.
What I tried so far:
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Reimported all assets.
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Reverted any changes done in the past 2 days from github client.
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Opened the project in other Unity versions (I use 2021.2.6f1. I tried updating to the latest version 2021.2.7f1 and opening in 2020.3.24f1).
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Removed the project and copy pasted the external HDD backup folder on local drive.
None of these worked. I can’t seem to narrow down what the problem is.
Since it’s not just one or 2 prefabs missing, I can’t possibly manually replace every single asset and reference. It’s a rather large project. I’m borderline having a panic attack just thinking about a whole year’s worth of work going down the drain with a deadline approaching in a couple weeks.