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Twine Version: 2
Story Format: Harlow 3.1
Hi! I am sooo new to interactive story telling. I’m using Twine. I have been creating an oracle type project helping for to think about self care. I recently renamed a project I duplicated and the duplicate disappeared. I just tried to do the same thing: made a duplicate. Tried to rename it and both the duplicate and the original disappeared👀!!! Only mildly but completely freaking out here. Can anyone help please? Many thanks!
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If you re-open Twine, then most likely some version of the story should be back. If not you could try checking your “My Documents\Twine\Backups” folder for a copy of what you were working on. Alternately, if you have a published HTML version of the story, you can just import that back into Twine.
This happens due to a bug in the current version of Twine where the “Rename Story” and “Duplicate Story” methods within Twine don’t properly update the story’s internal name. (The “internal name” is the one found within <tw-storydata name="(internal name here)" inside the HTML.) This means that duplicating a story ends up creating two stories that Twine can’t tell apart, and it gets confused.
If you need to duplicate a story, you should export the HTML with the new filename you want, then edit the HTML in a decent text editor (like Notepad++) to change the internal name to match that new name you want, save it, and then import that HTML into Twine. (At least until this bug is fixed.)
Unfortunately, once you have two stories with the same internal name in Twine due to that duplication bug, it then triggers a different bug, where Twine doesn’t properly handle that situation. To fix that you’ll have to follow the steps I laid out within one of the multiple bug reports regarding this issue.
That should fix things for you, though I would recommend backing up your stories periodically, either by exporting them to HTML or using the “Archive” option to back them all up at once.
Please let us know if you need any help after that! 
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Play / test temp file also works with import.
Amazing! Thank you. Yes that worked👍 And thanks for the duplicate story info. Have a good weekend!
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Also, when you first open Twine, if you look at the right-hand side of the page underneath the “+ Story” button there’s a little briefcase symbol with “Archive” next to it. If you click on that, Twine will save an archive containing all your stories to a folder of your choice. That way if things go awry you can just open up the archive and get back to an older version of your game.
I tend to always make an archive every time I open Twine. I try to remember to make another when I end the session, but often I’m too tired/dopey, and just fall into bed!