This project is invalid or corrupt......

i have just had the same experience and while it is nice to have a community try to find work-arounds, this is an issue and needs to be fixed. Comments from staff such as "I'm sure we all hope it doesn't happen again" are not good enough - unless the bug is identified and fixed, it will happen again. I'm sure you won't be putting the warning "Please note, projects are prone to corruption at any stage and may be unrecoverable" on the purchase page or that Storyline 2 is unstable. My 3 day project is now unrecoverable and has to be rebuilt.

Hi Andy,

I'm sorry you've run into this issue and error message. I know that our team has continued to investigate things such as this, but since the way in which users see that message has not been consistent it's difficult to have pinpointed the particular issue needed to be fixed. If you'd like to connect with our team and share your .story file as a sample and the steps you went through just before the error message that would be helpful in tracking down the root cause of such. You can send the file along privately here to our team. 

Got the same error today after 5 hours solid work. None of the suggestions work and project was opening fine. I thought that Storyline 2 took a backup when it crashed but clearly not always. It means saving your project every 15 minutes or so under a new name to avoid losing all your work.

Thanks for that update Dave and glad that worked for you as well! Storyline 2 does allow for automatically creating a back up file, but you have to turn that feature on. 

I'm having the same problem repeatedly. My file is crashing and I get the "invalid/corrupted" message, even though the file was saved and opened only hours ago without prior problem. I can't keep saving my files repeatedly with new names. Is there a permanent fix being put inplace? I am sending the most recent invalid/corrupted .story file via the help line, but it is incredibly frustrating to find that I am expected to pay to access help via chat now and can only leave messages with uncertain response time when the software keeps crashing my files. This software is too expensive to be functioning this way, particularly without a direct contact system to address the problem.

Despite saving my project yesterday in multiple versions with different file names every 10 minutes, and despite verifying each version as functional by opening and being able to use the files before again saving the newest file version, today I went to work on my project and found that NONE of the version copies on my hard disc would open. Yet again each copy is now called invalid/corrupted, despite being able to open the files yesterday. I was able to go online to DropBox and download their cloud copy of one earlier to my desktop and then open that .story copy, but the more recent fie versions held on DropBox also will not open after being copied to my hard disc. This again means hours of work lost - with no clear reason. This problem seems to be universal and reported for months. Is there a fix in the works?

Hi Ashley, 

I have not been having any issues since I last had the problem last month. But not being able to recover a project had never happened to me in Storyline 2 before (one of the great advantages of Storyline 2 over Storyline 1) and since I see others are having similar issues, it would suggest that there might be something in the latest update of Storyline (or Windows??) that is causing the problem.  Or maybe I was just unlucky.

Yes, I am and was using the latest version of Storyline 2, and yes, I had saved the .story file previously (many times in fact). Unfortunately, I was using the same file name and so the crash caused me to lose all the previous saves. 

Very fortunately, I was able to locate the .temp file and save myself 5 or 6 hours of work redoing the module.

However, best practices is now dictating that I save a newer version of my work under a different name relatively frequently (every hour or so). Fortunately, I am not having Davoren's problems.

Thanks!

Ok,  

This is not really going to help recover your material but this seems to be a fix for it happening again in Storyline2 (not sure about Storyline).  Well it is for me anyway.   I was creating content on one machine and then transferring to a laptop.  Each time I did this (it did not matter on which machine I created the content) I would try to open the file on the other machine and I would get the "Corrupt" error message.  

I was transferring between machines via the cloud.  I started to check with other colleagues and sometimes they could open the files and sometimes they could not.  

What I have discovered is that I can save the storyline file anywhere on either machine, then whenever I want I can upload them to the cloud.   However if I did this and the story file was still open in Storyline2 the file would then be corrupt.  If I try to move the file to a USB key I get a message saying that the Storyline file is still open and so this task cannot be completed.  I don't get this message when I am uploading into Google Drive and so have been inadvertently uploading material while the story file was still in use.  Google drive even puts a different icon on the storyline file if you upload while its still open in Storyline.

Hope this helps someone.  

Thanks for popping in to share Adam.

When working on an Articulate Storyline 2 project in a collaborative environment with other developers, or even moving projects for your use, use this workflow to avoid loss of resources, file corruption, and other erratic behavior that can occur due to network latency.

Hi Leslie.  

That is the workflow that we use.  However when copying story files to a networked drive we need to ensure that the file is closed in the Storyline application as now for some cloud applications there is no longer a warning message explaining that the transfer cannot take place until the file is closed.  

Madam