HELP! Retrieve images.

Hi.

My son has just started using Construct 3, no automatic backups have been made and this is what happened.

He had two construct instances opened, one superold version with only a few objects, and one with everything he had painted.

When he closed everything down he saved the superold last, so now everything is gone.

I have been searching like a mad man through chrome cache and tried to find out how and foremost WHERE the preview worker saves its data.

If I could only retrieve parts of it it would be great, my son is autistic and this really pains him.

I am familiar with file-recovery software, but I would have to know where to look.

Any and all help appreciated.

/thnx

How/Where was the project saved? If it was saved in google drive you could get lucky and restore it if it was synced. (Other providers may have similar options)

support.google.com/a/users/answer/9308971

Otherwise... I have to say chances are very slim that this is possible to recover.

I might add, I had this happen on accident once too. Luckily in my case I caught it before I saved over something. Maybe there should be some kind of alert for this.

Thanx for your answer WackyToaster.

Bad news is that it was saved to the computers desktop, (and windows built in file version backup had no backups).

(google drive has a built in file version history which is awesome)

The only thing I can think of is that the preview has to store data temporarily to be able to run the game, and I know he had tested the game. I've copied about 25k files from appdata/google/chrome etc. to be able to filter out any grafic.

So the question remains, where is the temporary preview data stored?

I'm not really deep into understanding everything but I think the gist is that Construct takes the image from the project location and turns it into a Blob which is stored on the RAM. Blobs get cleared from there of course once you close the preview again. I don't think anything gets cached. Images do get cached on exported projects, but not in preview.

So the images were only on the disk and inside the RAM. I doubt that you can recover anything from the RAM and the images on the disk have been overwritten, which makes them effectively unrecoverable.

At least as far as I understand it. So your best bet is to set everything up so this doesn't happen again (backups, version history,...) and move on. It's one of these experiences that I'd argue almost everyone will go through at some point. As painful as it is, afterwards you'll make extra sure you don't ever repeat that again.