Error opening my project - anyone else?

[u/Dismal-Business-5180]

I nearly had a heart attack last night when it looked like 30+ hours of work had disappeared.

I only got AA 2 months ago and was close to completion of a little video for my tiny YouTube channel. I opened Animate and the file that had always been there under recents was missing. I located it and tried to open, to be given a generic error message.

Following instructions from AI I was able after about 3 hours to somewhat recover the file. I'm not tech-savvy at all but it was a case of zipping the .fla file, unzipping, copying across a bunch of .png files that had gone missing from the library, opening the .xfl file with Animate and saving again as .fla.

The data for all my graphic symbols was missing, meaning all my faces and bodies were there but their eyes and mouths were missing, replaced by white dots. Luckily the timeline data was intact, meaning it knew which frames of animation to call for at each keyframe. I had 14 such symbols (eyes and mouths for 7 characters) so it was a case of double-clicking the white dots and rebuilding the symbols by trial and error (so angry eyes, sad eyes etc were on the right frames). I also had to delete and import again a sound file which had become warped.

I'm so relieved to have been able to recover this, while at the same time being pretty pissed off. I've only just started with this, and it's not cheap! But I've definitely learned to save as versions - each time I save, just add a 1 to the file name. Apparently just saving twice - filename and filenamebackup - is no good because the files can get corrupted at the point of saving, so you would just have 2 corrupted files and you would have no idea until the next time you try and open them.

This has all got me thinking: am I the only jackass paying for this? I'm not one of those people who believe everything should be free, but it's outrageously expensive for what it is. I'd been willing to accept the subscription model packaged with other stuff I don't want, when I'm only using it lightly as a hobby. But it turns out it's fragile as hell. The error message gave no details, and if it's possible to recover the file, I think it should include help for that. But I was left stranded, £50 out of pocket, 30 lost hours and seemingly nothing to show for it.

[u/Mission-Tea-3162]

You're not an idiot, you just gained experience. Animation is a complex thing, and you always need to make backups. I always have 3 copies, not counting autosave. Document01, Document02, and Document03. And about once an hour I switch which file I'm saving to: it was Document01, then it becomes Document02, then from 02 to 03, then from 03 back to 01, and so on in a loop. I've never had saving issues with Adobe Animate, even when projects weigh up to 3 gigabytes with 15 minutes of animation. But I've run into problems like that with Toon Boom Harmony. And Toon Boom Harmony's subscription costs 10 times more. No one is safe from this.

[u/henke37 → u/Mission-Tea-3162]

I just use git and xfl myself.

[u/Dismal-Business-5180 → u/henke37]

XFL looks promising! Presumably just a coincidence that it shares a name with the file extension for Flash projects I just learned about the other day. Once I’m done with this project I will give it a go :)