Question Project Artifact Has No .META File

Please Help!

Today I opened a long-term project in Unity, and entered Play Mode. When I did so I got an error along the lines of:
Artifact Has No .META File, *followed by a long string of numbers and letters*

I closed Unity, and when I try to open it again the project would not open, but on the "Initialize Asset Database" phase of loading the process, it simply stops loading and shuts down the program, without any sort of crash message or anything like that.

As far as I am aware, I have done absolutely nothing to change my project files since I last had it open yesterday, when it was working perfectly. The project is stored on a 1 TB backup drive, since my wimpy 256 GB laptop does not have enough storage for it.

How do I fix these problems? Is the crash due to the Artifact problem? Do I need to get this artifact a new .META file? If so, how?

Thanks so much for all your help, and have a fantastic day!!!

 

So first there is this:

Import stuck, reimport-all, deleting Library/ folder, Library/ScriptAssemblies, etc:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/stu...rst-time-after-a-reboot.1143368/#post-7341272

But more importantly there is this:

Please consider using proper industrial-grade 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.).

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 the right .gitignore file:

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.

 

Awesome! After deleting /Libraries and 20 min of recompiling, everything is back to normal! Will look into Git!
As always, thanks so much for a help, you're a lifesaver!