Corrupted project file: does it happen far to often or is it just me?

Hi Chris, 

With the latest .story are you seeing an error message or it's just not opening? I know that working off a local drive can be difficult for some, but the latency associated with files on an network or shared drive are what can cause the issue. 

There are some other general tips about file maintenance here.  

If you're seeing this happen to each and every file though, I'd wonder if there isn't something else happening. I see that you started a support case - and our team is seeing some higher volumes today - but I'll go ahead and let them know that you reached out here too so that we can get you an answer soon! 

I am getting the error message that the project file is corrupted and cannot be opened. 

There were several threads on this within the last few weeks. A lot of us had good luck finding the temp file in the %AppData% folder, renaming it and moving on.

It does seem as though there have been a rash of these lately. Hard to believe that at this point in the product's lifecycle that it just randomly corrupts files and that it still requires files to be stored locally. Also...what constitutes local? Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox and many others use a locally cached copy that sync up to their cloud server in the background. Why should any Articulate product care if there is a process syncing the file...particularly if the product is using a .tmp file to do the actual work out of?

File and overall application stability has ALWAYS been my major complaint with Articulate products. When they work (which is the vast majority of the time) they are great. But...when they decide not to...it can be maddening.

Shouldn't stability be an on-going goal of the development team? As old as the product is now, shouldn't these kinds of issues have been long ago squashed?

I had no luck finding the temp files as instructed. I'm a Mac guy generally. Though I've used Windows for many years I don't often dig into its plumbing (it's scary in there). How exactly do I find this folder?

As for the file corruption issue in general, this is a bad, bad problem and needs to be sorted out at the code level, stat. I didn't think file corruption was even still a thing in 2017 until I experienced it with Storyline 360. :(

Hi Chris,

Here's how to look for your temp files: 

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. 

As for the Mac - have you disabled the shared profile between the  Windows and Mac world? That could be the piece that is causing corruption. Here are some other best practices for working with Storyline on a Mac. 

on a Windows box, you'd go to \Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Articulate\Storyline

There you'll find a plethora of .tmp files. Look for one that contains the name of your actual .story file. It will also probably have a numeric string at the end of the file name. 

Sort by date/time and when you find the most recent .tmp file, copy it out somewhere safe and change the extension from .tmp to .story. You should be back in business with minimal content loss.

Good luck!

Ah, it's a hidden directory. That's what was throwing me off. Thanks!

Ugh, I see no .tmp files there. I went to <username>\AppData\Roaming\Articulate\Storyline, which contains two folders: 360 and Themes. Neither folder has any temp project files. ???

Hi Chris,

I'm sorry to hear that those were empty for you - it's not a guarantee that you'll be able to find projects there. One of the items that could be causing that behavior is if you haven't enabled the auto recovery feature of Storyline. That's a setting you can control here.

The auto recovery feature was enabled. :(