Extracting meshes from a corrupted Blender file (Missing DNA block)

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1

I had a power outage and lost quite a bit of progress. Now when I try to open or append from the file it says that the DNA block is missing.

I’ve seen many past threads on this not really addressing the issue. I wonder if there has been any movement in data mining corrupted files and extracting specific things. My corrupted file is the same size as my previous saves. Any help would be appreciated.
Some points to avoid redundant posts:

  1. This is the autosave, and it’s corrupted.
  2. I don’t have a .blend1 as I only saved once 24 hours prior
  3. I can’t upload it to sketchfab because of the size limit (I’m at 600mb and the limit is 500)
  4. Appending gives the same error
  5. The file version is 4.1
2

did you check the docs?
Recovering Data - Blender 4.2 Manual

If you’re lucky find the quit.blend file. If that doesn’t work :frowning:

3

Make sure that the .blend1 file is in the folder where it is stored.
It is available by changing .blend1 to .blend.
※ This file is a backup that is created when you save the file.
As far as I know, there is no way to repair the damaged .blend file. :thinking:

4

It’s too late now but fortunately I just came to terms with my losses and powered through redoing everything again.

Hope someone solves this in the future either way. I think it’s possible because people have reported that uploading to sketchfab can salvage whatever’s written inside the corrupted .blend. It’s probably just a matter of writing a converter that dumps every mesh from a blend into another format.

5

Get yourself in the habit of saving often, best with incremental saves.
Blender 4.2 has a command for that now in the File menu.
So when all things go bad, there’s still the incremental list of files to choose from.

Not what you want to hear I guess, but we’ve all been there at some point.
Might not be the nicest life lesson though… :wink: