Help! "Lost" my work due to click & drag

Hey, somewhat new to Blender. I intended to import a .blend into my current project/.blend. Tried a click & drag of the .blend file as that seemed the most logical, and it seems to have performed an Open without asking me about unsaved changes. I lost a lot of changes that I really don’t want to recreate. What am I missing? The open process felt more like a scene switch than an open+close, since it was so fast (and didn’t ask about unsaved changes). Where’s my old work?

your old work is the last saved file, or you could be able to recover something more if you access the temp folder where blender saves (temporary) auto save file (look for the path at User Preferences->File).

EDIT:
BTW, this is by default a temporary recovering, and after a reboot you’ll loose them, but if you want to make auto-save files to be permanent for the future you can choose or create any other folder.

paolo

I tried both of those, but neither have my final copy of work. They’re back about 2hrs.

What is the blender user preferences set to for autosave time under the file tab? If it is set to anything over 2 hours then you may be stuck having to recreate what you lost. You can change the autosave time to something shorter so that it will autosave sooner than later. I got mine set to 2 minutes. Also if you do recover a saved session you will want to save it after the save recovery.

The auto-saved file should be complete excluding the last 5 minutes of work by default, the interval can be set in the user’s preferences.

Sorry, I’m afraid you have no other chance to recover the 2 hours of work.

paolo

Yeah, mine’s set to 2min, but the auto save file doesn’t hold the new work either. It’s like all of blender’s recovery operations completely failed.

I suppose that you re-opened the file, and 2 mins after it overwrote the recovered file.

paolo

hate to say it, but just move on with your lesson learned. blender has basically no overwrite/unsaved warnings or protection.

learned my lesson, but if blender is going to go up against the big boys, they need to learn the use of message boxes and confirmations.

another big one to be aware of is closing the console window will terminate your session with no warnings. as a bge user, this pisses me off.

While these are helpful at first, they so often get an automatic response that after awhile these are useless also. They annoy people so much, that you automatically click the buttons without thinking (well at least without thinking anything except “Of course I want to do it, i did it didn’t I!!!” - followed quickly by “Oh crap!”).

atleast a warning would give you a chance. then lost work would be user error, not blenders. there could also be a setting to disable verification, like there is currently for closing unsaved files.

Here’s my take on this. Create back ups! What I mean is when you are done with the file at the end of the day. Save it and name the file with the date that you work on it. That way if anything goes wrong, you can go back to the last copy and work from that point. When you are done with that model completely, upload it on a cloud service AND on a external hard drive that you will never carry around as much. That way work is never lost!