If you are requesting technical assistance with Twine, please specify:
Twine Version: 2.3.16
Story Format: Harlowe 3.3.3
Hello, sorry if this is a bit frantic I am panicking only a little bit. My computer crashed while I had the project open, and when I restarted my computer, it was gone from the twine offline app. I checked this forum as well as others, and there seemed to be other people that had this happen to them, but it’s been years since some of those responses. I was wondering if there is any chance I can get it back. I see the file in my file explorer, but it won’t import, and when I put it into word, all it shows are boxes. I created this account minutes ago, and it won’t allow me to attach the file, however, I made a google drive link: Help fix please - Google Drive
I’m sorry, there’s nothing to recover in the file you linked.
If you kept the file in a cloud storage folder you might be able to recover a previous version.
This isn’t going to be what you want to hear, but I had this happen and was totally unable to recover the project. I hope that’s not the case for you, but if it is, I’m sorry. I religiously export drafts now to prevent this from happening. Twine is a great program, but whatever bug is causing this really needs to be dealt with…
I will second this. I’ve fallen into a very rigorous workflow with any serious project throughout the writing process: There’s a private Draft project on itch.io and I’m exporting it and creating a zip file of the support media folders and uploading it to test and make sure everything works online as I go (mainly also because you gotta export to test media.) side benefit is it also means if all goes kaput there’s a version usually from the last time I worked on it or a couple days before online to fall back to.
I try to keep all this project detritus on a cloud drive and work on it from there because I can access it with different computers and not worry about update mismatch. Of course occasional copies down to local drive for safety as well - this also means on a laptop with no internet connection I can play around with the audio and image files remotely.
Sorry to hear about the crash - that really sucks. I know it’s very much one of those things that’s only useful before the thing happens, but it’s worth being aware that you can export a Twine “Archive” from the Story List. Others have already recommended exporting drafts regularly - and that’s great for a work-in-progress - but if you want a solid backup of everything you’ve written in Twine (in case of emergencies, or to import onto another machine) then the archive will let you bring in all your stories at once.
