Lost scene in story

Aug 31, 2023

I am working on a Storyline file. It consists of a number of scenes. Upon opening the file today one of the scenes is entirely gone. The lost scene was a drag&drop quiz I have programmed and luckily already exportet to Review. Yet, I might have to change something.

I am shocked that a scene just happens to disappear. Has anybody experienced this before? Is there a possibility to retrieve the scene?

Edit: The file is saved on Microsoft OneDrive.

6 Replies
Luciana Piazza

Hi Luka!

Thanks so much for reaching out!  We recommend always saving and publishing Storyline projects on your local hard drive (typically your C: drive) when possible. Working on a network drive or an external USB drive can cause erratic behavior due to latency. For example, it could cause file corruption or prevent you from saving changes. 

As a workaround, I'd like to recommend you check your temp files to find a working version that could include this missing scene.

Here are the steps:

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.

I hope that this helps! If you're still running into trouble, we'd be happy to take a closer look at your .story file in this thread or privately in a support case.

Looking forward to hearing from you! 

Luka Peters

Hello Luciana

When opening the file this afternoon the lost scene was back again! Yeah!

So, I immediately moved the file to the local harddrive. Yet, I want to make regular backups to the cloud drive. Another tool I am working with, Techsmith's Camtasia, has a built-in option to save a complete project as a .zip file with just one click. I don't see such a function in Storyline but would like to suggest integrating such a function. Of course, I can zip the project manually, but doing it right out of Storyline would be very convinient. 

I am also happy if you have any further suggestions about secure file handling. 

Eric Santos

Hi Luka,

I'm happy to jump in and so glad to hear that the lost scene has been recovered! I understand you would like to make regular backups of your Storyline projects to OneDrive.

The sync feature is available within OneDrive. You can sync the folder containing your Storyline project and set it to sync to OneDrive automatically. It's a good idea to back up your Storyline projects to OneDrive, but make sure you're opening the copy of the project from your local drive when making edits.

If you require any further information, please let me know!

Luka Peters

Hi Eric

Thank you for your reply. Automatic sync is activated by default in our organization. I just didn't know that working with files on the cloud would have the risk of corrupted files. Thus I guess that I am still stuck with manually zipping and saving the Storyline files/projects from local drive to cloud drive.