My whole digital painting file got corrupted right before a client deadline

I was putting the final touches on a big character piece for a client in Chicago, about 8 hours of work in, when Krita just crashed. I reopened it and the .kra file was totally gone, like 0 bytes. I tried every recovery trick I found online, even dug into the temp folder, but nothing. This was two days ago, and the project is due tomorrow. I had to start completely over from my last exported PNG, which was just a rough sketch. I'm so behind now and I'm working through the night. Has anyone else had a Krita file just vanish like that? What's your backup plan to stop this from happening again?

3 comments

3 Comments

caseythompson2mo ago

My buddy in Austin lost a 40 hour animation project last year when his SSD died. He had no backup, just the project file on his drive. He had to tell the client and eat the cost. Now he uses a free cloud sync folder for his active work and does a full copy to an external drive every single night. You need something automatic because manual saves always get forgotten when you're tired.

drew_hart42mo agoMost Upvoted

Read a tech blog that called the 3-2-1 backup rule the only sane way to work now. Two local copies plus one off-site cloud save covers most disasters.

umar492mo ago

Yikes, that's the most expensive lesson in hitting "save" I've ever heard.