Unity killed another project.

Well there goes either the 2nd or 3rd project of mine. I don't understand why unity3d is now corrupting my projects. I've been working on a concessions sim for the past 3-4 months now and today Unity decides to crash every time I try to start the project. I can't access it at all now. I created a new concessions sim project and copied the files over. Terrain data is corrupted, unity lags horribly when only running my concessions sim project. All models, texture data, and prefabs were reset. More than 50-60 hours of work down the drain. I can't seem to catch a break. Its' one thing or another.

I'm thinking my hard drive might be dying too. Could this cause random file corruption deletion? I might go out and buy another hard drive today.

 

You should have at least one or two backup external drives to make sure things like this won't destroy your project...

 

Agree on the backups.

I've managed to mitigate these sorts of issues by telling Unity to make text meta-data, then if a project gets corrupt like it seems to every other day, one can simply delete the entire Library folder and re-launch Unity. It takes a long time to re-import everything, but everything will be as you left it.

 

I do make backups but not on a regular basis. This time around I didn't make a backup for almost a month. Usually its' once a week ill do a backup.

 

You could use version control to help too, revert back to previous changesets and just commit at end of each day.

 

I have regular backups, cloud sync, version control and an extra paranoid measure: Export parts of projects as packages. I can roll back from anything one way or another

 

And now you learned why you should make a backup after every important step

I usually pull two or three backups per session. Sometimes it`s over 10 backups a day. And from time to time i clean up the backups, keeping only every 10th, and when 50 is full every 50th. That way i can be sure that there`s always a way back. I work since over two years now at my project. And this has saved it more than once now.

 

Is that an option or something?

I have a lot of problems with projects just randomly dying too. Luckily, I've got pretty crazy about my backups.

 

My way to save projects is to use Mercurial to save me from burning my work time.

 

The suggestions above are all approved, its part of being a dev. From when I started 20 years ago things have improved a ton, even back in the Unreal1 days you could corrupt your entire level by building the BSP data, I think I had 200 different versions of one level because of this, no auto back up. They have free to use version control software out, use it. Only other thing I can say is that my hands are so used to hitting control s every few seconds I can't really think of how not to do it, its very sad to me.

 

I don't need to do anything but leave the external HD connected...
Mac's Time Machine does it all for me.
Often I try something new on a script and when I see that I did a total mess I know I can open Time Machine on the last our mark and the old working script will be there.

 

You think?

 

Get a 250gb SSD, install windows 7 and all programs on it and use a 1TB HDD as a secondary to store all your crap - music, models, pictures, project directory, etc... Get a large power backup that doubles as a surge protector. Backup to an external HDD weekly or more if necessary (doesnt sound like you need to backup more than that.)

Problems solved.

 

What cloud do you use? I used dropbox all the time for my regular backups but it did a number on my internet speed. What do you mean by version control? I use github for storing my scripts.

At the beginning of the year I bought a 1TB hard drive for my steam games. I don't mind paying 90$ for another 1tb hard drive, ill just have to buy more NZXT rack mounts to use it. Universal power supplies are a little pricey. At the moment i'm not in the best position to buy one. Thanks for the suggestions!

Take it easy. No need to be sarcastic. I'm no wheres near knowledgeable about computer parts repair. I'm assuming its' dying because of the awful whirling noise coming from it and the amount of random files that keep disappearing from the hard drive. If its possible i'd like to make it so my PC does an auto backup once a day. I did start coding a program to do this but lost interest half way through.

 

You're aware that you are losing random files, the HD sounds like death and haven't got a new one? Really? Why would you even make this topic?

 

I use my own cloud - with ownCloud
It works exactly like Dropbox, except I'm using the storage on my own server instead of paying for 100GB increments.

For code I have my own GitLab instance running.

Current hard drives should be really quiet, but a few years back you could get really noisy ones. Then there are 10k rpm drives which are even louder. But if it is louder than your CPU, GPU and PSU fans it's time to consider swapping them out. Invest in some Acronis imaging solution or whatever (I dunno what works best on Windows) to smooth the transition. Then you don't need to reinstall.

There's a built-in backup solution you can schedule in Windows. Since Windows 8 (at least) it only backs up select user areas, though. See Acronis solutions for proper system snapshots

So this is what you probably need:
Low-level disaster recovery: Some form of disk image tool (Disk Utility does the job on Mac)
System settings: Built-in Windows backup (or Time Machine on a Mac)
Your projects: The system backup, copying to a sync folder (this is important; if you work out of a sync folder it syncs your mistakes!), version control (every time you finish a function or method is good to commit a change, in my opinion, and push it to the online repo as often as you can be bothered) and branching.

If you start experimenting with something that diverges from the original plan it's recommended to simply copy the project and give it a different name. It's worth it in case it doesn't pan out.

Finally I recommend having a system drive with all the software, but relying on a secondary drive/partition for the actual projects, if you can. If there is a disaster that destroys the OS you can quickly pick up after reinstalling OS + Unity.

 

Use a SVN... they can reversion the whole project if something ever get to screwed, you can setup one for free on Google in a few minutes.

 

Yeah. Edit - Project Settings - Editor - Version Control -> Meta Files

Once you do this, Unity doesn't need the Library to store metadata links anymore. It still needs it as an asset cache etc but you can delete the entire folder if it ever gets corrupt (for me this is *always* the reason Unity crashes on start-up) and it will just rebuild it next time you open, without losing anything.
Also makes Unity play nice with any version control software (just tell your version control software to ignore the /Library and /Cache, and all metadata will be preserved in your version control automatically via the new meta files.) I use Plastic SCM for the nice GUI and super easy checkins and updates.

 

I had a similar problem when importing new Prime31 plugins - the project crashed on each subsequent load. It was fixed easily enough by manually deleting the Library folder and then restarting Unity, it'll reimport everything though.

 

It's a funny post in June 2013.

Greetings, time traveler! Are you from 2000 when there weren't yet lots of clouds and free SVN servers? or Bitbucket... or different cloud services...

Actually there IS a strong need to be as sarcastic as possible - it's the only way to teach you how to be a good developer

 

Actually, not everybody likes backing up there virtual data on other networks, and also the community shouldn't be sarcastic. He asked for help, you learn from mistakes and if you can't figure it out, help is the answer.

 

I am not a fan of sarcasm in forums because people very often get it wrong and there is often a touch of not being respectful. But try that one out:

From my point of view, if quoting alone sounds sarcastic, it should be allowed.

About everyone knows how it feels when you loose work because of technical issues. It is not pleasant at all. But you can't blame Unity for that (just read the title of the thread). It is far more likely that the cause was a broken hard drive. Everyone feels angry if something like that happens and a lot of people (myself included) intuitively react by blaming someone or something else. It is mostly a good idea not to start a thread while you are still angry. S*** happens.

 

I'd strongly encourage getting proper version control going ASAP. And that doesn't mean just check in some scripts -- check in everything. You should be able to get latest on another machine, open the project in Unity, and run.

 

game development without proper source control is an accident waiting to happen.

if your internet connection is slow use git, you can do local commits often and just sometimes sync everything online.

also: just backing up scripts and nothing else does not help you in any way usually. either backup everything or it's not worth anything.

 

I lost an entire project when clicking switch platform between ios to android, the computer locked up, had to power off, when I powered back on the project wouldn't open no matter what I tried. (left it going overnight in case it was just trying to convert in the background) installed second version of unity and couldn't open the project.

Now I make a backup every day, multiple times, but it takes 15+ minutes to export an entire project so not something you do every hour. It froze during making a build as well last week and when I rebooted the computer the entire scripts folder under standards assets was simply gone and all the scripts were missing their associations on all the objects in the project. Lost 6 hours of work as my backup was from the morning.

I only have the problem on my Mac, not my pc...I've never had a piece of software that actually deleted assets when it crashes, only lose the work that wasn't saved but never just wipe out entire folders of assets.

 

Except you dorks neglect to understand just how bad it really is to add unity free into a SVN repository.

Try not to give misinformation. Unity FREE cannot be on a repository (especially one with a team) without HUGE corruption issues. You can try forking $50 for one on the asset store if you like....

And by reading these responses, I can smell the smug of the typical Apple community a mile away.

 

You need to learn Unity and more importantly your OS so you can figure out how to recover from things like this.

As it is you can navigate using your OS file browser to go to the Unity editor text log and find the offending resource(s) by reading the editor log. Then use your file system browser to go to the(those) offending resource(s) and delete them. Unity will then likely start for you. It is likely as simple as deleting a shader your GPU cannot handle and you'll only need reassign a shader to the now magenta mesh(es) that works when Unity starts back up.