Perplexing missing references to prefabs?

Unity Engine
1

Hello community :slight_smile:

I work with Unity and in the Unity editor almost every day for long periods of time. Today, I loaded up the Unity editor to get some more work done, and to my surprise, I received a lot of errors telling me about some “Missing Reference Exceptions” or something along those lines.

Investigating further I found it had to with some of my prefabs. The picture of the prefabs were all intact, but when I click on the prefabs, nothing would show up in the inspector window. They had a yellow “missing” message where the “apply, revert, etc” prefab info would usually be.

I deleted nothing from these folder yesterday, and I’m 100% positive I didn’t. I havn’t even meddled in the folders with the missing prefab data for a long time. So how do errors like this all of a sudden happen? How does prefab information magically go missing? With no cause really, other than today is a different day than yesterday? lol.

The ONLY thing I can think of, is that I got a critical exception on my computer yesterday (blue screen of death) and my computer had to suddenly shut down. Could this have anything to do with making some of my prefabs get messed up in Unity?

I’m soooooooo glad I made a complete backup of my project not to long ago, and so copying and pasting the data and meta data from my backed up prefabs (specific to the missing ones) – fixed the errors for me.

If not, I could have lost my entire GUI system I had going. I would have been extremely angry if I had to redo my entire GUI system. It seems that this happened for no reason at all? Nothing changed from yesterday. It was working great yesterday.

So, I’m curious if there’s an explanation as to why some of my prefabs went missing??? But, it’s all good, cuz the problem is now fixed, but only because I made an entire backup of my project.

2

If Unity was open when you bluescreened, I could certainly imagine that prefab files could become corrupted.

Do you still have the bad files? Can you open them in a text or hex editor and glance at them, and compare them to your good backup prefab files?

3

Also: everyone else, consider this your daily reminder to back up your files frequently! Because shit happens.

4

Well I copied over the “bad” files, so I don’t think I have them anymore. Ya, I would have liked to have figured out what the exact cause of the problem is or was. The weird thing is, I don’t think I had Unity open when the critical error occured on my computer yesterday. So Unity wasn’t even open then.

But yes, other than getting to the bottom of why data all of a sudden went missing, this is a great reminder why you should back up your stuff early and often :slight_smile:

I still want to know why it happened though. But alas, I may never know.