Original Story file disappeared when I published

Hi, Adrianna -- I'm sorry to hear you lost your file. At any point before publishing, did you save the file? Unfortunately, publishing does not automatically save your file. And if you closed the file after publishing, you should have seen the following prompt:

I have been saving the file all the way along - and presumed all was ok as every time I logged back in it would appear in my recent files, and I cant remember what I did when the prompt appeared. I have asked my local IT team to search - and it has completely gone :(

I presume there is no way of extracting it from the zip file?

Hi, Adrianna - You are correct; to the best of my knowledge, there is no way to extract a source file from the published output or zip file. Perhaps others in the community know of a special tip/trick/hack to assist you. In the meantime, you may want to try publishing and saving some test files to see if this happens again or if it was a one-time occurrence. 

This is the only post I can find on this topic, but me and my coworker are having the same problem after publishing, the Articulate Storyline file is no longer available. I constantly saved my work before and after publishing.  However, after publishing the storyline files disappear, and no longer show under recent. I was lucky and found my files in the recycle bin, so I was able to restore the files. However, my coworker is not as lucky, and her project is completely missing. Why are Storyline files disappearing after being published? As mentioned originally, there are times when minor tweaks need to be made after publishing.

Hi Doug, 

The Storyline file prior to publish with an extension of .story isn't saved automatically upon publishing, nor is it included in the published output. You'd want to make sure that you manually save it and we always recommend doing so to a local drive, as working off a network or shared drive is known to cause some odd behavior and ultimately file corruption. 

If you're finding a copy of the files in the recycle bin, that sounds unusual to me - and not something I've heard previously. I'd want to have you work with our Support Engineers who could take a look at some more specifics happening on your end to help narrow down why that could be happening. If you want to go that route, reach out here and just let them know I sent ya along from this forum discussion! 

Has there been any updated solution to this issue? The same thing just happened to me and I saved the file numerous of times before publishing.

Hi Mia,

I am sorry to hear that your file is missing! Are projects stored on your local hard drive (C: Drive)? Also, has this happened to other files, or was this the first time it occurred?  If you are working from a network drive, this can cause erratic behavior to happen like file corruption or prevent you from saving changes. 

If this behavior does continue to happen and you are working locally, I would like our Support Engineers to take a closer look! You are always welcome to connect with our team here. 

Hi am not sure how recent this post/these posts were made - I was very excited to export my file as SCORM2004/4th edition but then IT did not know why my quiz questions were literally cut in half on the screen on Canvas - so I thought OK let me go back and export as a video instead and upload to Canvas as Video - well the file was gone - I did save on my desktop (not C) but when I tried to import it back in to Storyline a bunch of gugu stuff I don't understand just popped up literally every single file and its extension..... so does this mean all that work is gone? I guess am confused bc I had an old draft I was playing around with and it always showed up when I opened to work on Storyline... now nothing. .... Not even able to reuse the actual file I have?

Hi Mariam!

I see that you submitted a support case, and my teammate Renato was able to help you! 

I've shared this with him so we can make sure your files are safe! You'll hear from him shortly.