The hated "in use by another process" and "may have been changed by another user" errors; a partial resolution?

Dec 26, 2018

Rick Sell
By Rick Sell

Ooooh, how we hate this situations. This insight may have been brought up before, but here is my two cents, and part of this I learned, or should have, years ago.

When I am using SL360 and working in the office, by default I work from the file on the company server. No big deal as everything is right there and works fast. However, when I work remotely, and by default work from the server, there can be a significant synch lag with the server. When I save, then do more work, and the server has not yet synched with the newly saved version, I get those hated errors. Once the server does synch, all is fine, but that can take a good while. The file, when saving looks like the attached. Notice the automatically generated additional copies, which have been commented on many times.

There have been many remedies from reloading SL, for prior versions, to renaming the file, to deleting earlier copies of the file. This creates many issues and can cause version errors.

My remedy is to simply save my work to my local drive, then save to the server occasionally, say when taking a break. The issue, of course, is lost work if my local drive has problems. 

This may not be a panacea, but it was helped me. Any thoughts folks?

9 Replies
Katie Riggio
over 5 years ago12/26/18 at 7:43 pm (UTC)

Hey, Rick! 

I'm curious to hear other thoughts, but I echo your remedy: While it's a-ok to back up projects to a shared or external drive, be sure to always work and save the Storyline files on a local hard drive (C: drive).

Also, check out our recommended workflow for collaborative network environments! And if you come across this roadblock again, please do let us know!

Leslie McKerchie
over 5 years ago01/29/19 at 4:06 pm (UTC)

Hi Ruth,

There may still be a working version of your project in your temp files. Here's how to check: 

1) Open this folder in Windows Explorer: %appdata%\Articulate\Storyline 

2) Scan the contents of this folder for a file that starts with the name of your project. If you find one, copy it to your desktop. If you find more than one, copy the latest version to your desktop. 

3) Change the file extension of the copy on your desktop from *.tmp to *.story. 

4) Double-click the file to open it in Storyline. 

File corruption is unpredictable, and there's no straightforward way to determine what causes it. Common causes are environmental (disk errors, power outages, improper shutdowns), viruses, failed Windows updates, and even file size (i.e., very large files have a higher risk of corrupting). Consider using the preventative measures described in this article to protect your project files.

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