Missing references issue happening intermittently since 2018.3 update

After updating Unity from 2018.2 to 2018.3 (2018.3.0f2), my project starting losing references to some Prefabs in the inspector intermittently. I ended up figuring out that it was the same few prefabs that were affected by this. (Sometimes it was one or two lost references at once, and other times more, but it was always from the same set of 9 or so prefabs that were having issues). The fileids for those prefabs were changing, even though I hadn't touched them. The fileids are apparently what is "referenced" to in the inspector, so when those changed the references were lost.

After some testing, it appears this was only happening once I actually closed Unity. (I can't be sure, but it may also require switching platforms and/or building the project before closing). Reviewing the Editor-prev.log, I saw that Unity was hashing the same assets that were having issues (fileids were changed).

So, it seemed that the problem laid with the Cache Server.

My Cache Server mode was set to "Local" with a custom cache location.

My workaround (which has been working for the past day): Clear the cache and disable custom cache location.


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UPDATE 1/22/2019: It looks like it has nothing to do with the Cache Server. I've tried disabling it and changing server settings, but the problem persists. The server seems to just be picking up changes that the Editor makes to the fileids. AssetDatabase.ForceReserializeAssets did not fix the problem, either.

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Editor-prev.log snippet:

Code (CSharp):

1. Hashing assets (1 files)... 0.001 seconds
2.   file read: 0.000 seconds (0.220 MB)
3.   wait for write: 0.000 seconds (I/O thread blocked by consumer, aka CPU bound)
4.   wait for read: 0.000 seconds (CPUT thread waiting for I/O thread, aka disk bound)
5.   hash: 0.000 seconds
6. Connect to CacheServer localhost:63360
7. Updating Assets/Prefabs/LevelObjects/Balls/Standalone/Bomb.prefab - GUID: 21db94a4512e941148dd05d08718ad1d...
8. done. [Time: 26.832506 ms]
9. Script Compilation Pipeline Post Process Assets time: 0.000014s
10. Assembly Updater Post Process Assets time: 0.000035s
11. Disconnect from CacheServer
12. Refreshing native plugins compatible for Editor in 0.97 ms, found 2 plugins.
13. Preloading 1 native plugins for Editor in 1.54 ms.

There have been some other threads that seem related to this:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ds-randomly-change-for-entire-project.568024/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/object-references-become-missing-after-building-the-game.561574/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/edi...the-object-referencing-it-is-reloaded.568120/

And one QA post that I'll reply to concurrently to creating this thread
https://answers.unity.com/questions...ence.html?childToView=1587025#comment-1587025

Some people that may care about this...
@Prodigga @LeonhardP @DigitalSalmon @Beennn @snair692 @JoeGrainger @runevision