Within the last week, I've experienced two major crashes in CTA4, both seemed to result in the project file either being corrupted or otherwise unable to open.
The first crash may have been due to an auto Adobe update, which could have disrupted the PS project I was working with. But the second appeared to be a standard project crash. Both projects contained a significant amount of animation and now seem to be completely out of commission as far as I can tell.
Is there any way I can restore these projects? Or any way to avoid these very damaging crashes in the future?
 

Hi DH,

Silly question time...

Have you run a registry check on your system (e.g. CCleaner)?  I think there is a registry clash somewhere with Adobe products along with a weird bad memory address allocation bug (at least it was in my case). Running a registry clean has stopped about 90% of the application crashes.

hope that helps

zen

Although a bit late now, when working on a project you should always save often and to a new file each time. Do not overwrite an existing project file.

When you do this  you will always have a recent working copy of the project to drop back to in the event of a corrupt file. Obviously you won't want to keep every save so you can delete earlier copies but always keep the last few saves as a precaution.

Sadly if your project won't load it is likely corrupt, but you can try going into Preferences (CTRL + P) and lower all your graphics settings down to a minimum. Then close down CTA and reopen. Now try to load the project again. If it is the project size that is the issue you may find it will load now with the reduced graphics settings.

                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Thanks for all the input. I'll try each of these and see if they help. I doubt I'm getting my files back, but at the very least I'll lower the chances of crashes.
I'd rather not perform a Save As regularly in place of saves. If that's what needs to happen, then that's that. But it seems like if things are working correctly, that shouldn't be a necessary precaution. 

Another strategy I thought might help is moving the projects from the network drive to the local disk. Might add some stability?