Prefab lost all assignments

Loss of references generally stems from a few common things:

  • moving files outside of Unity (this includes moving, renaming, duplicating, etc… don’t do it!)

  • improperly source controlling the meta files (or deleting them, or making them be regenerated).

  • renaming internal parts of a 3D model. Unity maps names to internal linkages.

At the end of the day, the only sure defense is proper source control discipline and process.

If you are not using source control, start doing so immediately.

If you ARE using source control, make sure you configured it properly (see Unity-specific tutorials).

And here is my standard source control blurb:

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.).

You can also push git repositories to other drives: thumb drives, USB drives, network drives, etc., effectively putting a complete copy of the repository there.

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 an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:

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.

“Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later.” - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards

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