Unity Crashed - Was saving the Project but when reopening...nada.

Unity Engine
1

Been working in Unity for hours, making sure to save every few minutes (File > Save & File > Save Project). Refreshed the terrain after making some changes and…the dreaded Unity Crash occurred. No big deal I say to myself. Re-lauched Unity, opened my project and…nothing. It looks like a new project. Hierarchy only has Main Camera and Directional Light and empty grid space in the Scene window.

If I try to Open Project again it says the project is already open. In doing some sleuthing I find a ton of info on if Unity crashed and you DIDN’T save, all along the lines of this:

** If you want to restore your crashed scene, you have to go to your project’s directory (this is the folder that also contains the Assets directory) then enter the Temp/__Backupscenes directory. You will find the 0.backup file within. This is your saved scene file. **

So I looked into that and I don’t have the 0.backup file in my Temp folder so I am kinda stuck and kinda irritated. Any help would be appreciated if anyone else has a solution.

This makes me VERY nervous now if I can’t recover a saved Project after a crash, very nervous indeed.

2

I’m sorry you’ve had this issue, but the year is 2021. There is no need for this nervousness.

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.).

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/736093/3

Here’s how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/807568/3

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/826718/2

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/719810/2

Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/834885/5

Generally setting Unity up (includes above .gitignore concepts):

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/how-to-git-with-unity

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

3

Hi Kurt,

Thank you very much for the .git links, I will definitely take a look at them and hopefully never have this issue again!!

Question: Since I was saving my project multiple times, I would think that there would be save files somewhere I could use to reload my project. I am coming up blank. I am having trouble figuring out the native structure for ‘when I click save, it puts a save file blank’. Are you aware of if it is possible to force a reload of a project from a saved file other than the 0.Backup file created when you click the Play button for a scene?

Thanks again!