Other project completely empty.

me and my friend are working on a game and yesterday i saved so that's not it. today i checked the project, only to see, it was back to the way my friend sent me the project

 

Sounds like you and your friend are not using version control software! You should start using version control software or managing your project together is going to be a complete nightmare.

 

Lost progress / project / work / stuff disappeared in Unity.

This article is to help you when you have lost significant progress or work in your Unity project.

It is designed to give you avenues of discovery and investigation.

It is NOT a guarantee of restoring your lost work. It is NOT a substitute for proper IT / Data security procedures.

To decide which parts are applicable to you, look for major bolded headings.

EVERYTHING IS GONE, YOU CANNOT OPEN THE PROJECT

Your project probably is still on your computer. Try a computer-wide search for some unique filenames that you know are in the project you think is gone.

To start your search, one common file to all Unity projects is named

ProjectSettings.asset

Some things that might have happened:

- you are not opening the project that you think you are
- you are in the correct project but not opening the same scene you had open before
- you dragged the project (or part of it) into the trash (intentionally or inadvertently)
- you moved the project (or part of it) somewhere else (intentionally or inadvertently)
- an overly-aggressive antivirus solution quarantined it because it saw code being compiled in there
- you're using a directory sync like OneDrive or Dropbox... NEVER USE THESE SERVICES WITH UNITY!
- something else??

As I said, it's probably still all on your system to be found if you look in the right places.

A typical Unity project will have at a minimum the following folders:

Assets\

ProjectSettings\

Packages\

EVERYTHING IS PRESENT BUT MY SCENE WINDOW IS BLANK

Close Unity and make a full project backup RIGHT NOW. Do not do ANYTHING else until you back it up 100%.

Ideally copy that backup to another computer, or back it up to another external hard drive entirely. This is just basic data processing best practices during data recovery operations.

If you can see all the files and folders of your project, make sure you are opening the scene file you were working in.

Once you have opened the scene, look in the hierarchy window, select an object and move the mouse over the Scene window and press F to focus that object.

Additional notes:

- ALWAYS use proper industrial grade source control (see below)
- NEVER use Dropbox or any file sync mechanism in Unity.
- NEVER move files within your project, except by doing it within Unity
- ALWAYS be sure you are fully backed up before upgrading Unity

SCRIPTS OR ASSETS ARE MISSING OR BLANK

Some info about Missing script warnings, broken prefabs, GUIDs, renaming GUIDs, etc:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/problem-with-git-and-missing-scripts.1090876/#post-7024801
https://forum.unity.com/threads/scr...ead-after-loading-editor.998413/#post-6487297
https://forum.unity.com/threads/scr...ead-after-loading-editor.998413/#post-6488230

EVERYTHING in Unity is connected to the above GUID, which is stored ONLY in the metafile, and hence why the metafiles ALWAYS MUST be source-controlled.

It is super-easy to inadvertently change it by renaming outside of Unity. Don't do that. Instead:

- close Visual Studio (important!)
- rename the file(s) in Unity
- in Unity do Assets -> Open C# Project to reopen Visual Studio
- now rename the actual classes, and MAKE SURE THE FILE NAMES DO NOT CHANGE!

If you are NOT using source control while you do this, renaming files is an EXTREMELY dangerous process. Use source control at all times so that you can trivially revert if you miss a critical step and damage your project.

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

I usually make a separate repository for each game, but I have some repositories with a bunch of smaller test games.

Here is 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. Digital storage is so unbelievably cheap today that you can buy gigabytes of flash drive storage for about the price of a cup of coffee. It's simply ridiculous not to back up.

If you plan on joining the software industry, you will be required and expected to know how to use source control.

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

 

and also, there was a probuilder error that said facepicker mat failed to load. maybe that has something to do with it

 

This is a known issue, there is myriad reports on this, unfortunately somehow they managed to clean up the project so well that is impossible to retrieve the data.

Happens at random in new projects, has happened to me three times so far.

Or Unity should make a stable version and stop making new versions before fix the critical issues like this and the swapchain crash nightmare.

At this point the engine just does not work, is not reliable at all. Last unity version that worked was 2019 one.

 

There's no way based on the scant content of this thread that you can conclude this is a Unity bug.

If you have a specific bug report to make you can do so, otherwise you're just spreading FUD for whatever reason.

 

Is not working, so is a Unity bug, what else could it be ? Is wiping out all work in new projects, this never happened to me in Unity 2019 also in more than 50 projects (same machine), so is obviously a new Unity bug in 2021 (maybe 2020 too).

I base this on the wiping out happening to me 3 times already, i know exactly what happened and how could not find any of the files anywhere. Just created a new project, inserted some of my assets, worked a bit and closed Unity. Then on reopen there was a clean project like when i first created it. There was nothing in Library, or temporary, or erased files in Recycle Bin or windows temporary folders etc

I am not spreading anything other than what happened in my projects, be totally wiped out, this for sure is not the expected Unity behavior.

Also check this thread, there is a big number of reports on the same
https://forum.unity.com/threads/all...reset-when-launched-through-unityhub.1157303/

Unity 2021.3 has severe issues, the other is the swapchain one, with random crashes of graphics in newer GPUs. This also never happens in Unity 2019 or 1050GTX class of GPUs, only newer ones, so is also a clear big bug.

Bugs like those that make Unity looks totally unstable and with random behavior are not acceptable in my mind. Are showstoppers and should be handled as priority before any further development takes place.

 

User error or some other software. For example putting a project into a NAS or Dropbox and that software resetting your project, or placing your project somewhere that is managed by some other software and therefore likely to be wiped out. Hard to imagine anything else really.

Regardless of the source of the issue, if you're not using version control you're a fool.

 

There is nothing like that though, i dont use any of those and nothing like that happens in other Unity versions like 2018 or 2019 which i still fully use in parallel.

The steps i did were very simple and few and there is no way to be some error there, that is the issue. I just closed a perfectly working project and on reload of Unity was gone, that is why this is an extreme Unity bug.

I dont use version control, never needed it before in 10+ years of development and have never once lost work, so that is on Unity side to provide a stable software as it was before. If becomes unstable the issue is that all users will abandon it, not just me and version control wont help in any of that process.

So the issue is not the individual problems, but the Unity becoming unstable in general, which should be addressed than Unity ignore it.

Imagine if you worked in word and it crashed every few minutes or erased your text at random etc, having some backup plan wont help much as that platform would not be reliable in general to use, that is the case with Unity 2020 and above. That was not the case at all in Unity 2019 or older.

Graphics don't randomly crash with Swapchain errors in Unity 2019 nor projects disappeared. Thus was a perfectly stable system before they moved to the Unity 2020+ development. In 2021.3 i just not know if randomly a project will work or not for multiple reasons.