My progress on new project is gone, is it my fault?

Hi, just to premise this, I'm very, very new to Unity, so my apologies...

I started working on a project a couple of days ago, reopened it today and there were a few errors, did some googling and managed to fix the errors (the right way I think?), everything seemed to check out well but after everything was corrected it took me to a project that didn't have any of the prior edits I'd made to my project. I'm positive that I saved the project before closing it out, so is it possible that my issue has to do with what is discussed in this forum?
Forum: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-deleted-my-entire-project.377964/

"This sounds like something at the OS/filesystem level.

Seriously, this really sounds like it's got nothing to do with Unity and everything to do with your OS/filesystem/hardware..

Do you have some Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) running on your machine? (something doing a backup?) sounds like something is reverting your filesystem.

It's possible (read 'likely') that the cause of the 'reverting of files' is also the CAUSE of Unity crashing."

Just wanted to ask ahead of time as I'm really not very well-versed with tech and want to improve, will truly appreciate any advice you guys have time to offer, thank you so much!

 

I had this once too. Always use something like Github or Plastic SCM. Always.

 

Excellent! Some things to check in order to find your project:

- the recycle bin
- any antivirus "quarantine" directory
- perhaps other places on your computer where you may have put it inadvertently?

I'm sorry you've had this issue. Please consider using proper industrial-grade enterprise-qualified source control in order to guard and protect your hard-earned work.

Personally I use git (completely outside of Unity) because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up as well as free places to host your repo (BitBucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.).

You can also push git repositories to other drives: thumb drives, USB drives, network drives, etc., effectively putting a complete copy of the repository there.

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/prefab-links-keep-getting-dumped-on-git-pull.646600/#post-7142306

Here's how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/2-steps-backwards.965048/#post-6282497

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/whe...grammer-example-in-text.1048739/#post-6783740

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/your-techniques-to-share-code-between-projects.575959/#post-3835837

Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/removing-il2cpp_cache-from-project.1084607/#post-6997067

Generally setting Unity up (includes above .gitignore concepts):

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/how-to-git-with-unity

It is only simple economics that you must expend as much effort into backing it up as you feel the work is worth in the first place.

"Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later." - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards

 

Wow thank you so very much for this! I really appreciate all the information you included and the time you took to write this post, truly am in your debt, was worried this learning process would be a very slow crawl for me without some guidance.

Will check all of this info out to make sure it's all set up correctly ^ and follow all the advice you've offered, as this project and the learning process are both very valuable to me.

Thank you so much for all your help Kurt!

 

Thank you so much for your help! Will definitely follow that advice from now on.