I have a project which is finished, but today when i opened it to do the render it gave me the message 'Unable to open file', the annoying thing is that i always save another copy of the project file under a different name which is saved on the same usb drive 
I work between to pc's hence the usb drive and this drive has all my files and projects on ( i do back it up but not every day) but unfortunately this project which i had finished was 2 days out of date on my backup drive...I think that maybe the file has been corrupted some how, i always use the eject usb device option in windows before removing the drive.

Anyway my point of this post is to ask if there are any tools which can repair project files or in the very least a program which can unpack the project file so i could maybe salvage the project?

Cheers guys

Sadly, I know of no "recovery" tools or techniques.
Been there, done that.  You have my sympathy.  Maybe someone else has an idea.

This is why I frequently do a "Save As."
If a version gets corrupted, I can usually revert to an older copy.  I may lose a few hours (or a day's) worth of work, but not the entire project.

"Experience is something you get, usually immediately after you needed it."
Very true.  I have the battle scars from lessons learned.  (And still learning.)

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Damn it!  Wishful thinking eh?  Oh well, it'd be a welcome feature to have a 'previous version' option etc....one day maybe ;-)
Thanks for the reply

Adding a "Save to New Version" which would just increment the current one is a no-brainer -- have ZERO idea why they haven't implemented this often asked for request (never hurts to ask again, though), given it's a trivial programming task.

Failing that, being disciplined enough to "Save As" to a new version number is what I always do -- and I mean ALWAYS.

When I was teaching folks used to ask all the time "do I need to back up all my data?" and I always gave the answer "It's the same as what teeth do you need to floss -- only the ones you want to keep.  I would expand that nowadays (particularly since storage is so cheap) to say you should only back up to multiple devices the data you want to keep (I also follow this rule religiously -- after each day I back up ALL my documents, which is the only place I have saved work, to at least two and sometimes three different devices, each very different -- so a USB solid state drive, a NAS drive (not hooked to my computer but just the network) and, of course, on my SSD hard drive.  The failure of all three at the same time would be fairly long odds, but once a week or so I back up to another completely different SSD that remains offline the rest of the time, in case of lightning damage.

It's a hard lesson to learn, but once you've been bit you seldom forget.

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Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

I work in IT and always tell clients to back up their data and save regularly...Maybe i should listen to my own advice a little more, but i always think 'i'll back it up later'...and then suffer later...lol

                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Thanks for the suggestions Peter, unfortunately it did not resolve my issue...The project was not only 350mb so tiny compared to some of my others, i'd just done a tonne of lip syncing and animation.  
But i have turned down the prefs as suggested for future projects