Lost my file. Is Recovery possible?

cmac

I just recently got into this app. I noodled around and then finally started working on a creature sculpt bust in which I put a ton of time. I literally finished last night, only to open the app this morning...and it's gone. I was saving after every session and theres no evidence of that in the history from what I can see in the folder.

Is it a goner? it was so many hours of work, and I'm worried it may just happen again. Makes me hesitant to use the program and I was really loving how intuitive and fun it was.

Would love to know if there is a way I can recover it, or avoid this happening again in the future.

Thanks for your time,

-Cmac

JavierEdo

Hi cmac, I'm sorry to hear that.

Can you confirm that you were saving using the Save button? (by that I mean pressing it explicitly rather than relying on autosaves?)

While the app was saving, do you remember if you may have accidentally closed the app or opened another one?

There is an autosaves folder in the forger directory (named autosaves), although what's in it will depend on how heavy the scenes you're working with are as there is a "background app time limit" for apps on iOS, so forger uses it when scenes aren't heavy.

cmac

Hi Javier,

Thanks for the prompt response. I definitely hit save directly at the end of my sessions, I don't rely on autosaves on any program if I can help it, but the weird thing is none of the autosaves that would've kicked in anyways are there either. it's like the file got deleted. Would there be a way to see if that happened?

I did not close or open any apps while using it either. I'm coming to terms with the fact I'll probably never see it again as it so bizarrely ghosted out of nowhere. My bigger concern is it will happen again, and how to maybe start checking the autosaves or set things up to ensure that it doesn't

Thanks,

-Chris

JavierEdo

cmac It's really really odd, I've never seen this happen but I saw a recent review that mentioned this exact thing, I'm wondering if there is any relation to recent iOS updates since the scene saving code has barely changed in nearly 10 years (the most recent change is 4 years old).

Coincidentally, I'm revamping this part to make saving & loading much faster, but these changes don't have anything to do with any possible issues, they are just an improvement (a significant one).

Just so I understand, you're saying that in the iOS "Files" app there isn't any scene listed?

If you're afraid of losing work you can always use "Save > Save Incremental..." to keep incremental scenes with your work, although the app is tested daily for hours and saving is an instrumental part of testing so if there were any issues this should have happened already in testing.

Out of curiosity, can you confirm that you have your "forger Document Storage" set to "On My iPad" by going into the Settings app?

Open Settings app
Find "forger" on the app list.
There is a field named "Document Storage", what is it set to?

(edit: I'm asking about this setting as it's outside of forger's, or any app's control, and I'm wondering if some combination of things could cause this)

JavierEdo

Sorry I keep thinking about this and I'm now wondering if you may have run across this corner case:

Could your iPad have little disk space left? When storing things to disk I can only think of it failing due to disk space running low, the current (public) scene format creates scene files that are fairly big, but they are even bigger before compression.

The latest version of forger (released on the 11th, last week) checks for disk space left and shows warnings when opening the app as it's likely that devices running low on memory could impact the overall user experience.

nadlyj

Hello! Kind of nudging this, I just had the same issue. I was working on a sculpt (file1) and I saved it like three times before closing it to start working on another (file 2) (I have been working on file 1 for a while, and it was named). I started working on file 2 for a bit, saved as, closed it to work on file 1, but file 1 gone, the only file I can see is file 2. I have over 100GB of space still left on my iPad, and even if I didn't have the most recent save of file 1, I can't even find the file at all anymore... /
Hope that made sense, sorry 😅