Lost changes

Jun 20, 2014

Karen O'Brien
By Karen O'Brien

I have a storyline project that I inherited from a former co-worker.  I made multiple changes to it 2 days ago saving as I went along.  I published it and sent it to the approvers for review.  Today when I opened Articulate, it wasn't listed among my recent projects and when I opened it from My Articulate Projects folder, none of the changes I made are there.  Could Articulate be saving it someplace else and I just can't find it.  Or are my changes gone?  Is there a way to pull an editable version from the published folder?

12 Replies
Christine Hendrickson
almost 10 years ago06/20/14 at 1:27 pm (UTC)

Hi Karen,

Unfortunately, it sounds like the file may not have been saved after it was published, or it was saved to a different location on your machine. 

I recommend doing a search on the machine, if you can, for either the file name or the extension itself. I'm not sure if you've tried this already, but it might be a good place to start. 

For example, if you open Windows Explorer, you can search for *.story and that should show any file with that extension. 

If you're unable to find the updated file, I'm afraid it's not possible to recover the project from published output files. I know this isn't what you're wanting to hear - but hopefully that won't be the case. 

Let us know how it goes!

Best,

Christine

Suzanne Taylor
8 years ago04/04/16 at 1:42 pm (UTC)

Same situation. I saved throughout my revision but come the final save/close, Storyline popped up weird errors. Only gave me the opportunity 'not save' so I did figuring all the other times I saved (5 minutes prior to problem) would still be kept. I opened my project today and a recovered file from 3-28 was all that I could work with. Am extremely disappointed in Storyline today. Because of it's glitch I lost DAYS of changes AND recordings. 

Leslie McKerchie
8 years ago04/04/16 at 5:45 pm (UTC)

Hi Suzanne!

This thread is a bit dated, but 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.
Darren Goossens
almost 6 years ago06/06/18 at 5:26 am (UTC)

Just a note that as of June 2018 (2 years after this last, very helpful comment), this is still a bug! I am working away, modifying an existing presentation. I click somewhere, and suddenly get bounced back several slides and all my changes for the last X minutes get lost  -- even if I have saved the file!

The first time it happened I thought, right, I better save the file every change. But that does not help! It is like it is reverting my last few changes -- sometimes as many as 6 slides of work is lost!

This is just not acceptable.

Darren Goossens
almost 6 years ago06/07/18 at 3:39 am (UTC)

​Thanks for that. It's pretty annoying... Having to exit and restart all the time. And it does not remember where you we in the document, either. Oh well.

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Surj Moray
almost 6 years ago06/07/18 at 1:39 pm (UTC)

Best practice is to save the file on your local drive instead of network drives when you are working on it, this minimizes chances of corruption.

Another best practice I have is to keep uploading a version copy every hour in a network drive or SharePoint site  - been following this since SL1 days - if file gets corrupt i still have a one hour back version, so not all of my work is lost.

Alyssa Gomez
almost 6 years ago06/08/18 at 6:53 pm (UTC)

Hi there Darren,

Gosh, I'm really sorry you keep losing your work. It sounds like you're doing everything correctly, following our best practices to prevent crashing, and you're still hitting a wall. We never want anyone to have to go back and spend more time redoing work because of a Storyline error.

To try and prevent this from happening to you again, I'd like to enlist our team to help you. Could you click here and let us know more about your setup? Specifically, details like what version of Storyline you're using, what version of Windows you're using, and were your project files are saved would be helpful. 

Also, be sure to let me know your case number so I can follow along, as well. 

Darren Goossens
almost 6 years ago06/12/18 at 12:38 am (UTC)

Thanks. I'll try working locally and simplifying paths and filenames. The strange behaviour where you click on a document and suddenly get moved back some number of slides and lose your work ... I don't know if this filename stuff will help, but it might.

FWIW

Storyline v3.16.15842.0

Windows 10 Pro (version 1803) Build 17134.48 (x64)

Running on a Dell Optiplex 7050 (Core i7-7700)

All very standard and up to date.

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.