I saved a project of mine earlier and came back to it just now. I had spent well over an hour getting a costume just right. I came back and the costume had somehow been reduced to nothing. Zero pixels. The costume name is the same and it was not deleted but it exists as… nothing.

I'm confident that I did not delete this costume or edit it like this.
I'm posting here for a possible explanation. How was my work destroyed?

edit: just shortened a bit

maybe a bug?

I hate it when that happens…

It might have been a saving error where you exit the project before it completes saving…

ProdigyZeta7 wrote:

It might have been a saving error where you exit the project before it completes saving…

There is no way I'll ever be able to replicate this costume again. Seriously no way whatsoever. I'll never get this work back again thanks to the Scratch team. I have never been so angry in all my days. Words fail me.

acedannyk wrote:

ProdigyZeta7 wrote:

It might have been a saving error where you exit the project before it completes saving…

There is no way I'll ever be able to replicate this costume again. Seriously no way whatsoever. I'll never get this work back again thanks to the Scratch team. I have never been so angry in all my days. Words fail me.

Oh man - that's awful. Ok - first, can you give us a link to the project? It's a good place for us to start. Next, the costume name would be helpful, so we can quickly get to the place where the problem happened. Finally, the approximate times when you worked on the costume, and when you came back and saw that it was missing would be good.

Did you receive any warnings from Scratch while working on it (like network connectivity problems?)

Lightnin wrote:

Ok - first, can you give us a link to the project? It's a good place for us to start. Next, the costume name would be helpful, so we can quickly get to the place where the problem happened. Finally, the approximate times when you worked on the costume, and when you came back and saw that it was missing would be good.

Did you receive any warnings from Scratch while working on it (like network connectivity problems?)

Hey, Lightnin. Okay, well I decided I'd have to remake this costume sooner or later so I spent some time on it to remake it to a decent enough standard. You could say I'm no longer in shock over losing the costume and I wouldn't wish to waste your time searching for something which I no longer really need to find. ProdigyZeta7 mentioned it could be a saving glitch and my gut is telling me this is the most likely reason, but it could have been something else.

Once again, I did let my frustration spill into my posts a bit but I've had the time to sleep and cool down about this now

- I wouldn't want to expose the project before it's fully finished
- The costume which was named “Level 17” was reduced to 0 pixels, but I have rebuilt and replaced it since the incident
- I certainly couldn't remember the times I worked on it
- I don't recall any warnings

Have you received any similar reports of incidents like this?

acedannyk wrote:

Lightnin wrote:

Ok - first, can you give us a link to the project? It's a good place for us to start. Next, the costume name would be helpful, so we can quickly get to the place where the problem happened. Finally, the approximate times when you worked on the costume, and when you came back and saw that it was missing would be good.

Did you receive any warnings from Scratch while working on it (like network connectivity problems?)

Hey, Lightnin. Okay, well I decided I'd have to remake this costume sooner or later so I spent some time on it to remake it to a decent enough standard. You could say I'm no longer in shock over losing the costume and I wouldn't wish to waste your time searching for something which I no longer really need to find. ProdigyZeta7 mentioned it could be a saving glitch and my gut is telling me this is the most likely reason, but it could have been something else.

Once again, I did let my frustration spill into my posts a bit but I've had the time to sleep and cool down about this now

- I wouldn't want to expose the project before it's fully finished
- The costume which was named “Level 17” was reduced to 0 pixels, but I have rebuilt and replaced it since the incident
- I certainly couldn't remember the times I worked on it
- I don't recall any warnings

Have you received any similar reports of incidents like this?

Just one - Cheddargirl had it happen, but we haven't been able to reproduce it. Hers involved Flash crashing though.

It's weird / concerning b/c autosave should be triggering every 2 minutes. So it shouldn't be possible to lose more than a few minutes of work (provided you didn't lose your internet connection - but the editor should warn you if that happens.)

Lightnin wrote:

Just one - Cheddargirl had it happen, but we haven't been able to reproduce it. Hers involved Flash crashing though.

It's weird / concerning b/c autosave should be triggering every 2 minutes. So it shouldn't be possible to lose more than a few minutes of work (provided you didn't lose your internet connection - but the editor should warn you if that happens.)

Autosave appeared to be functioning consistently as it should when I was working. Something I do a lot with this project is switch from “See Inside” to the project page in order to test things I had just changed. I know this process saves the project automatically, something could have gone wrong somehow but I don't have any clues to go on really.

Hopefully similar incidents don't come up often and if they do, more info can be taken from them. It took me off guard; the last thing I expected was a costume I had worked on in several seperate sessions of working on the project, to not be deleted, but simply erased. Could saving have been stopped prematurely, resulting in the costume's pixels not being saved, leaving nothing? I'm not familiar with the saving process works.

I've seen the same thing (blank costume) happen in mine a couple of times.

Fortunately, I didn't switch back to scripts tab, so it didn't autosave, otherwise it may have been permanent. (BTW, why should simply switching to costume tab and back trigger autosave??) But as soon as I noticed it, I closed the browser tab and reloaded the project - and the costume was fine then…

I'm wondering if it's related to the corruption I've mentioned in bugs+glitches (red “undefined” blocks)?
http://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/11569/
http://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/11056/

A couple of times, I've definitely seen those red blocks appear in a script, but then not be there if I reload without saving. (I'm assuming that saving it would make the corruption permanent - and that's how they've ended up staying there in the projects I mention in topics above.) So that behaviour sounds similar to the missing sprite costume…

And regarding Flash crashes - I see that happen fairly often when I try to view/edit my 3d projects (maybe one in ten tries on the Mac Mini, Firefox or Safari, 2GB, OSX10.6.8), so could be a clue - actually, I nearly always have flash crash on my old dell mini netbook (Linux Mint, pretty old version, Firefox, only 1GB RAM) when I look at InterXeptor - I can see from the stats monitors that it's basically filling up all the memory on the poor machine (and the browser always locks up for a couple of mins, everything becomes unresponsive, and then it [usually] eventually comes back with flash crash - had to stop looking at it on there ‘cos occasionally it doesn’t come back and I have to force power-down).

It's kinda worrying if there is some form of project corruption going on during download of a project, ‘cos it’s so easy to miss it and then have autosave make it permanent (i.e. I suspect autosave is actually more likely exacerbating the problem than helping to avoid it…)

This happened to me once, but hasn't happened again. I wonder why…