so i dont know what happened but i went in to open my rail shooter game and everything was gone! i have all the assets that i put into the game still there but all my game objects are completely gone does anyone know how that is possible?
Hi felixq,
Are you able to open your project in Unity? If so, are your assets still in the assets folder? A common ‘mistake’ is that Unity sometimes opens its empty default scene, and people think that their progress is gone. If that’s the case here, try to open your scene in your Assets folder.
If your entire project folder is gone, maybe you inadvertendly deleted it. Please check the recyle bin of your operating system. Maybe the missing files are there, and you could retrieve them.
If your project is gone and you cannot find it again, check where you saved it. The project should always be located in a normal folder on your internal harddrive, never in a managed folder such as the Desktop folder. It also must not be in a cloud system, on an USB stick or somewhere else. Unity needs full access rights and a fast connection to the (free) space.
Last but not least, if you have an antivirus software or firewall, check if they deleted your project.
Please let me know if this helped.
See also:
- Forum User Guides : How to mark a topic as solved
hi nina
i dont know why but my scene was put as sample scene in the scenes folder and i had to drop it back in but it seems all my progress was still there. i dont know how that happened i didnt mess with anything when i closed the game before and this has never happened to me but glad i didnt lose everything these tutorials are long as hell i dont know if i wouldve gone back to do all that lol
I’m glad your progress is still there. The best would be to save your scene with a proper name now. Then make a backup of your project folder by duplicating it. Save the duplicated folder somewhere else, maybe on an USB stick. To save some free space, you could delete the Library and Temp folders in the backup folder. If something odd happens again, you could at least retrieve your backup.
If retrieving the backup didn’t work either and if you did not invest a lot of time implementing your own ideas, you could simply download the instructor’s project state by the end of the video. In the resources of almost each video, you can find a link to the git repository. On GitHub/GitLab, you could download the project state at the end of the video and continue to work with it. There usually is no need to start the entire section from scratch. 
well if you’re not using Git, you can do what I do (but that’s a dumb, but robust way of saving your progress… It’s what I currently do (because Gitlab/Github/Git(whatever other names they got) scares me))
On your folder hierarchy, right click “Assets” (check the screenshot below) and then choose “Export Package” (format will be .unitypackage). It’ll save literally your entire project wherever you want to save it, and it’s insanely helpful when you’re about to do something incredibly risky (I do them all the time), like completely changing a system(s), with no warranty that things will work out in the end
It’ll eventually save you from a plethora of tears if your project ever lands in an unrecoverable state, and I highly recommend you do this every single time before you try something crazy (and keep backups everywhere)
Hi, the Git course is on sale. $14.25 for the most important course on the site. This one is golden. I was amazed at how much better the presentation was compared to all the YouTube videos I looked at before getting this one. With the knowledge this course gave me, I am confident that I will never have issues with loosing my work or breaking my project. It is so easy to just roll it back to a point before the issues occurred. Do yourself a favor and get the git course!
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what is git course
i never knew you could do that ill try it but do you have a way to keep it organized in case you need to go back to a previous state?
another user mentioned something about git what is it exactly?
usually I just take the entire “Assets” folder as a backup. Sure it gets incredibly big over time (my saves are approaching 2 GIgabytes in size because I have other assets imported as well), but I delete extremely old copies to compensate for that, and when I name them I am extremely specific with my names, as follows:
- What project is this?
- What date was this created on?
- What changes does this version offer compared to the previous one?
Again, I recommend learning Github and Gitlab instead, but if you want to do this the old and tiring way like me, feel free to knock yourself out 
Git is a program that runs in the background and tracks all of the changes in a project. It allows you to decide if the changes are something that you want to keep or not. It is sometimes referred to as source control or version control. As I am working on a project it watches and logs all of the files that get changed. At the end of the night, I commit the changes, if everything is working OK. If I encounter a problem later, git allows me to revert the entire project back to when there were no issues. The other main benefit is that you can back up your project to GitHub for free. Then if tragedy strikes your computer, you have an easily retrievable back up. It is also used for team projects to track each individual developer’s changes and help to merge them together into the main project. Literally all software development companies use git or an equivalent. When I told my son (who is a software engineer for a large insurance company) that I was taking classes in C#, he lectured me at great length about git. He was right. It is essential to game development. If this is a possible career for you, you need to learn and use git.
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lol I wish I knew about git before mindlessly throwing away my NLP Model (believe it or not, I basically made ChatGPT a year before ChatGPT came out… I just didn’t have a truck load of computers to train it, so I deleted it when I was desperate for space, as my laptop was suffering in performance…)
I showed it to my university back then and asked if they’d be interested and would be willing to share their supercomputers for me to train and test it, they said no 
Yeah, but are you going to get the class? If you want to get a job in the video game industry, it is a requirement to be able to use git.
Without throwing a lot of details out there, yes I do, but it might take a little bit of time
Time spent learning git is time well spent,
trust me, I know. This is not a problem with time (again, I can’t say much right now)
Git is a version control system, not a backup system. Even though many people confuse git for the latter, the difference is very important. A version control system allows you to save project states (= commits) and to revert to earlier commits. There are many more features. It’s definitely something you want to learn when working on larger projects. However, making backups is still crucial because it is very easy to break one’s entire project with git. Well, and files could get lost for other reasons. For this reason, always duplicate the files, and save them ‘somewhere else’ but not near your actual project because if your harddrive breaks, your project and your backup will get lost.
If you are interested in learning git, our Git Course might be interesting for you. That’s the one @edc237 recommended.
However, to follow our courses for beginners, it is not necessary to know git. As aforementioned, our instructors have public git repositories. You don’t need git because there is a download button on GitLab/GitHub. On GitLab, it’s labelled ‘Code’.
If you know git, downloading the entire project is easier than navigating the website to download the project.
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Why on earth did you delete your NLP Model? Nowadays, free space is so cheap. You could have saved it somewhere. Who knows if you implemented a brilliant idea that could make ChatGPT (and/or others) faster/better? And even if not, it also would have been a great project for your portfolio. 
ahh… it’s not the end of the world. I made it once, I can do it again. It’ll take a bit of time, but it’s 100% possible! (but what genuinely broke my heart was the weight limit on my plane. It forced me to leave some of my most important notes behind, and until this day it breaks my heart. It took me 3 months to write them back then…)
The entire thing was only 403 lines of a headache 
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