Storyline is locked by another process

Hello Tawfick,

Thanks for letting us know that you are running into this error as well.

I'm not sure what troubleshooting steps you've done, but here are the common tips that we share:

• Ensure you're working locally
• Close any other instances of Storyline in your Task Manager
• Reboot your machine
• Copy and rename your .story file in File Explorer, and then open the new file from there
• Check for any applications that "back up" your files running in the background

If you've gone through all of these steps then with your permission, I'd like you to share your project file with our support engineers to investigate what's happening. You can share it privately by uploading it here. It will be deleted when troubleshooting is complete.

Hi,

I have trieed evereything you tell in this post and it does not work. More than 200 slides that I can't loose.

Can anyone help me?

If I open a new proyect and then try to import from the old one I CAN PREVVIEW all the slides from the old project, but then, when I chosse import, again the same issue. 

Desesperate.

Thank you in advance

It is clear to me that this is a major issue.  I find it very difficult to understand why there is constant messages .  This is continually doing the same things.  

I did not have Storyline open for a long time.

I had a project opened.  Had to save under new name.

When I tried to save new project under new name that was now locked.

This is incredibly frustrating.  This morning I have had three copies of same project. 

Hello Valde and Grant,

Thanks for contacting us to share what you are running into when working on and saving your projects.

You mentioned the troubleshooting you've already done, so I've opened a support case on your behalf so that you can work directly with one of our support engineers to understand what is happening and how to resolve it.

You each should be hearing from someone soon.

Agreed. It's the only program on my system that does this—that's ever done this. It can actually occur after a shutdown and restart. I'm a master of workarounds myself, but this is a major flaw that impacts productivity. It should be a top priority of Articulate to fix it, thoroughly, once and for all. 

Hi,

I couldn't stop working so I created the project again. I noticed that ass the project was getting bigger I had the same problem more often.

I saw the temporary files it creates for a 200 slides project is giant. As big as 17 GB or more of .tmp In may case I wok with mac and my windows is installed in a virtual disk (VirtualBox) so those 17 were struggling my free disk in windows virtualbox. I gave more disk space to VirtualBox and now I got to open the project again. Let's see what happens. My whole project is about 320 slides.

I hope this helps you. Please check your disc capacity.

Good luck!

Hi. I'm also having trouble opening and closing Storyline 360 files. I'm getting the error "is locked by another process." I've renamed the .story files, used Windows Explorer to 'Open with', have put my .story files in a variety of places (hard drive, zip drive) and the problem is still there. This started happening only a couple of weeks ago. Do I need to uninstall and reinstall Articulate 360?
Thanks. 

Hi Joe and welcome to E-Learning Heroes :)

It sounds like you're running into the issue with multiple files, so I would certainly lean towards a repair of your software.

We recommend working locally, typically your C: Drive, with your software, project files, and all assets to prevent any file corruption.

Follow These Tips to Reduce Your Risk of Corrupting or Losing Project Files

I get this error several times a day. It's very annoying and seems to be getting worse for some reason. I use Dropbox for cloud backups, which is running all the time, so maybe that's causing the problem. But I don't have any issues with other types of file.

Storyline also frequently creates copies of my files with a "2" added to the filename when I try to save. Then if I try to save again immediately after, it asks me if I want to overwrite the original.

Any chance you guys could bump this up the agenda?

I recommend to avoid using Google Drive, Dropbox, or other types of synchronizing applications. These are great for backups, but not for development. 

Do create a folder on your drive dedicated for development. Then at the end of the day, save your file, or use software oftware like Tortoise or Git for version control.