Saved Project opens empty with a default scene. Lost all work

im trying to reorient myself in Unity. its been a time. and im going through the tutorials again for visual scripting, again to reorient. ive lost everything ive done several times. not sure what im doing wrong. ive uninstalled everything, deleted everything, and then started saving frequently, saving scene and project each time. if I close the Project at any point, reopen and try to open any of the previous scenes, I get a deserialization warning, and all my work is gone, and what I have is either a default scene, or a scene that may have a couple of objects that I had placed near the creation of the scene.

can someone tell what I might be doing wrong. I generally assume user error on my part. im afraid to go any further trying to get back up to speed as I keep losing everything.

MacBook Pro M3 OS 14.6.1, Unity 2021.3.45f1 [chose this one as its closest to the tutorials files]

please help,
thanks

OK, so, you arent saving to an apple drive area are you? (it and one drive are the devils play things when it comes to development)

the actual errors you get could be important to the answers…

well its the internal SSD on the Mac
I get an error from Hub saying “this project is already open…[can’t remember the rest], must close to make changes”

and then the scene has a yellow error in the bar at the bottom saying…damn ive lost it and am in the process of installing latest editor. I deleted everything as well. I’ll see if I can pull from Unity Cloud. but the message start like “[Deserialization] could not open…[something something]…0”

Hub also keep asking for access to my keychain for passwords [thats another issue] I dont know if the two are related. but I reluctantly selected Allow Always cuz I kept losing work thinking this may be the culprit.

thanks for responding so quickly

just installed latest editor. ill see if I can retrieve a scene to get the message. or ill create a new one and see If I can’t get it to happen with Unity 6

If you arent aware if apple is saving that area to the cloud, then you need to change that knowledge. In short, do not save your work to a replicated area.

Im not a mac fan, so I cant assist directly with the mac related weirdness, so if its asking for your password that sounds odd, but maybe thats normal for a mac…

if it says its open, it means somehow you maybe clicked more than once? I occasionally manage it,

im not saving to a replicated area. saving to the default directory that Unity created on install. I had noticed I see my projects in the Unity Cloud page, I thought that perhaps it’s making a backup duplicate there. but I can’t seem to be able to access them. maybe thats just history. but I checked the backup folder as well. but its empty.

I read that you cannot have the some project open twice.

sorry I hope im not coming off negatively. just trying to sort out what im doing wrong. I need to get this going. but currently it’s hard to make any progress with anything when I keep losing it all. again, the project file is there in the Unity folder. the scenes, in the scene file. but if I shut down Unity and come back to a project/scene. the scene is pretty much a new scene, sometimes with a couple intial things a added to a scene. ACTUALLY, I noticed one time on creating a NEW scene, that a variable script was already in a folder I created. shouldn’t a new scene be empty aside from the default items?

You mean you are saving it under /Documents or similar. You aren’t saving the project to the Unity install folder, right? Just to be sure.

Could you post the full path to the project? You can XXX out any personal info in the path ie username.

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[user]/UnityProjects/MyProject

scenes are in…
[user]/UnityProjects/MyProject/Assets/Scenes

Okay that location is fine.

I wonder, although rare, some users do install antivirus on a Mac. They are known to be more trouble than anything, denying access to dev tools and sometimes even “quarantining” absolutely legit files.

Yes, it should only contain MainCamera and a light object.

I’m a bit stumped. Curious to see the exact serialization warning.
You may also want to try creating a new project just to see if this gives you the same issues. That way you’ll know if it’s project-specific, or wider (ie Unity install if not system).

Check the editor and hub logs, it may give you some idea as to what problems its having, while not all errors are fatal, looking at the errors may provide clues.

so the new Macs are sticky about everything installed these days. requiring a password to allow access to this and that. ive granted access to Unity to its password in the keychain, so I haven’t been getting the prompt to give access to Unity anymore.

as I said, I deleted everything and anything Unity from my machine [this is a clean machine by the way] installed latest, and im running through the exact steps ive been taking the last few times to see if I can get that error again. I will post it here as soon as I get it. hopefully this time, I will not.

ive created SEVERAL projects. eventually each one went dead, losing all its contents. other than a script, camera and the light. frustrating to say the least

I have no antivirus stuff or extensions installed. I think those introduce problems.

thanks for helping.
again, as soon as I do something that triggers that error I will post it up. I will save every few minutes. close Unity, open and load the scene and see what happens.

so far so good…Unity 6, made a new Project and have been making incremental saves as I go. have opened and closed Unity 4 times already and loaded with no issue so far. been doing this while typing the previous messages.

should I get the error, it will be posted almost as soon as it pops up.

to update: ive been working with 6000.0.34f1 since yesterday. I was only working with 2021.3.45f1 previously because I thought as it was closer to the the version the tutorials were done it, that there may be fewer error messages due to differences in versions the files were made with and im using.

anyways, since ive been using 6000.0.34f1, I haven’t experienced any issues. so perhaps it boils down to the older version of Unity doesn’t play well with current Macs?

again, if I get that error message again I will post it.

thanks for helping out

adding: I found the error, I had searched it to see if others were having the same issue. seems like a lot of people had.

[deserialization] object reference at index 0#

Good reasoning, it’s definitely possible that there may be Apple Silicon compatibility issues with earlier Unity versions.

Although your 2021.3 is on the latest patch level and was still supported until very recently.