I recently started try to make my own game to teach myself how to use choicescript. I’ve been using the ChoiceScript IDE to make it and was 7,000 words into my first project and having a blast.
Problem is I accidentally clicked the “add a new scene or project” button when I didn’t need one. Not a problem I thought, I can just delete it.
However deleting the scene made the IDE crash and uninstall itself. After reinstalling it I can see all of my files in the menu, however I can’t open them and hovering over them says no such file or directory.
Let me preface with this: CSIDE might have crashed, that’s certainly plausible. However, I’m fairly confident that it probably did not “uninstall itself”. What you’re seeing when you relaunched CSIDE is your cache getting reloaded to the previous state, so CSIDE tried to reload all your scenes, only they are now missing too.
What could cause both CSIDE and your files to disappear? I’m honestly not sure what I’d put my money on here. If you’d just said a file or files, I would indeed assume a bug in CSIDE. But the fact that CSIDE itself disappeared as well is very odd.
Can you provide any more information?
For example:
What version of CSIDE? (In the settings panel)
What operating system?
What kind of computer? Laptop? Was the battery well charged it had one?
If yes to the above, is it reporting any action or quarantined items?
And anything else you feel might be relevant.
Unfortunately I do suspect your files are gone, unless they’ve been quarantined by an antivirus program. Whatever app or computer you’re using, you should always back up work you care about.
Yes saying it uninstalled itself was a bit of a guess in my panicked state. I’m not exactly sure what happened, just that when I tried relaunching it from the shortcut I was told it didn’t exist so I tried reinstalling it which seemed to fix that issue.
Version says 1.0.1. I think I updated about 2 weeks ago.
Windows 11 26100.4652
HP Laptop, was plugged in to charge.
Not sure, 4 years maybe?
To be specific with the hard drive space, it still has 15GB.
Will try run a smart check and get back to you.
Yes I have Malwarebytes.
Doesn’t look like there’s anything in quarantined items.
I went to the location in my hard drive. The files for my other test project are still there. It’s just my files from my main project that are missing. Not in the recycle bin either.
Yeah I fear they are gone
I was about 80% of the way through to where I was going to send some friends a demo. Didn’t think I was far enough along to need a backup yet. Seems that was my mistake.
Update:
Went through the smart check you linked and it didn’t reveal any problems. I’m just going to have to start again tomorrow and keep a backup this time.
Hmm, that’s very old. If you’re having trouble getting to a newer version (1.3.4, I think we’re on now), DM me.
Thanks for providing the extra info, unfortunately as you probably surmised, nothing wildly suspicious there.
If you think of anything else, please do let me know. Wether CSIDE is at fault here or not, it would be helpful to know how this occurred for future prevention. Unfortunately with what we have here your guess is as good as mine!
For now I can only recommend backing up anything/everything you care about, all the time. There’s no telling when an app might crash, your harddrive might die or your power might go out. Dropbox, Google Drive etc can even do this in the background for you automatically.
The version 1.0.1 is probably from me reinstalling come to think of it. Not too helpful there, sorry. Updated now and it went to 1.3.1 which is probably what it was on at the time.
I keep backups for my regular writing projects. This was just my first time with ChoiceScript so I hadn’t gotten around to setting that up yet.
I know it sounds made up but I tried navigating to that folder and the files were 100% gone.
I’ve tried moving the project folder to a different (and larger) drive in case it was an issue with the drive. But at this point I’ve already started again.
I would try to use data recovery software to look for the missing files ASAP. Deleting files from a hard drive doesn’t actually delete the file data, it just marks the section of the drive that contained them as empty/not in use.
There are several free/open source data recovery tools available, but I haven’t used any of them recently enough to recommend one in particular
