How I recovered a corrupt project

Feb 24, 2016

I just had a very bad experience with a Storyline 2 project that became corrupt. I had been working on it for nine weeks and if I wasn't able to recover at least a part of it, the deadline would be missed because there was no time left to rebuild it from scratch. Fortunately, there is a happy ending, and I wanted to share some steps to take for anyone else who might have the same experience.

First of all, I tried all the tips and advice given by forum staff and experts for troubleshooting SL2: repairing, reinstalling, importing into a new project, etc., without success. I wasn't able to preview or publish the project successfully--just kept getting the error report--and was getting those nasty big red Xs when I clicked on the slide to try to modify anything.

So my colleague looked at the error report and said it may be a font issue. I was using a Google font that was properly installed, but even when I deleted the font from my system, things did not improve. I tried deleting every slide that used the font--still no luck. I did not have a *.tmp file backup; in fact, the modified date of the file continued to be 12/16/2015, even though I'd been working on the project nearly every day since then. I was ready to give up the whole project.

In the end, these are the steps I took to recover my corrupt file:

1. Delete the suspected fonts from my system. Restart.

2. In Windows Explorer, right-click on the corrupt file and select "Restore previous versions". I had only one previous version from the previous week (before corruption), but it was good enough.

3. Open the restored version in Storyline 2.

4. Save As to a new project with new name. Close Storyline.

5. Restart again.

6. Open the project. At this point, I was successfully able to preview and publish without the error report! Yay!

Now I'm going through and reformatting any text that used the bad font with a less desirable yet more standard font. I did end up deleting two slides completely, but I can recreate them without much anguish. These two slides began behaving strangely for no particular reason; i.e., they would take 20-30 seconds to display when I selected them, the thumbnails would disappear, I couldn't preview them--so I suspect there were more problems there than just the font. I only wish I knew what caused those issues so I could try to avoid them.

Hope this helps someone. My relief at recovering my project is immeasurable.

 

 

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