Error: Project is Locked by another process

Hi Sue

if you look in Task Manager can you see another instance of SL open?

Also, if you were trying to copy the file to dropbox or usb/network drive and you exited SL before it had finished copying sometimes that results in the message.

I already checked the task manager and there is no second copy of Storyline open. I was not trying to copy the file to anything - the program froze while I was trying to record audio, so I closed it and tried to reopen it and got the error...I have restarted my computer twice now, both warm and cold boot, and am still getting the error...

Sue Grannis

Wendy - what finally worked was I went out and changed the file name and opened it from the folder instead of opening it from the program...Thank Goodness that worked!!!

Sue Grannis

That was my next suggestion - changing the file name - so glad you got it sorted!!

Have a good day.

Just to let you know, when you reply by email to the forum, all your contact details are displayed - just in case you want to come in and edit them out.

Done - thanks for letting me know!

Glad that Wendy was able to assist you here Sue :)

I am glad, i found this post. Changing the name, worked.

@Articulate team - Any idea why this ODD Behavior. And any tips to prevent such issues in the future.

Hi Lal! Glad to hear this was able to assist you, but I'm not sure that this is a reproducible error. I know I've seen it linked to corrupt files before. I would advise checking out the information here to prevent corruption.

Hi, all, this did not work for me. And the irony is that this is a file that I did in fact work on locally. 

Any other ideas? I hate to lose it! 

Hi LaRue!

So, you have no other instance of Storyline running and have tried re-naming the file and this did not work for you?

Have you re-booted your computer?

Just encountered this error (again). Fortunately copying/renaming the file worked (in this case).

Any updates as to a status for addressing this? 

Hi Greg!

Looks like I just responded to a similar post here.

THANK YOU! WORKED IMMEDIATELY!

Delighted to hear you are all set, Danielle! :)

Greetings everyone.  I just encountered this and thought I'd share another scenario.  Our company has "CrashPlan" running which does background back-ups to the cloud.  When I tried to rename the file, it showed that this file was currently being backed up to the cloud.  I had to force the back-up application to 'sleep' before I could open my file. 

I'm not sure if anyone else has a similar back-up application running, but you might check for that too.

I appreciate you popping in to share your experience Henry and that could certainly assist someone in the future.

Hi all,

I just had this problem too… I noticed that I had a very long project file name within folders which also had very long names. When I tried to rename it by adding a character I got the “filename too long” error, which gave me the heads-up.

I made the filename a bit shorter, and bingo!

Thanks for popping in to share Shay :)

This is getting a bit annoying. I have to apply this workaround every single time I close the project and try to open it again. I realize the last response here is a year old, but this issue keeps popping up in newer threads.

Has this been identified as a bug? Is it being worked on?

Sorry you keep running into that error message, Felipe! I know that's got to be frustrating. Good idea to also open a Support Case--our Engineers are rockstars at nailing down these kinds of issues.

In the meantime, try these troubleshooting steps. Fingers crossed that does the trick!

Hi, I also encountered this same Error-message. As this is my first project, it was a huge scare. The re-naming worked (thanks for the tip), but surely after more than 2 years of people struggling with this issue, should this not have been addressed (like in fixed)?

I followed your steps - installed the new version. Installed all the updates, but finally, I had to re-named it to enable me to work on it.

I'm really sorry you hit this roadblock, JC. Thanks for letting us know how you solved it.

Since this is your first project, I would recommend creating back-up versions of your file, as well as following these tips, to be sure you don't run into a scare like this again in the future!