This is the most frustrating experience I’ve had with Unreal, period. Also, it happens a lot. Normally I’d just suck it up and rebuild, but I want some serious advice here because I don’t have infinite time to rebuild my levels after hours of work.
I imported a bunch of textures, did a bunch of bsp work that I converted to meshes, and then after 2-3 hours of work, I had a random crash. I was saving every 10 minutes with auto-save and manually saving every 30-45 min. I get about a crash every 2-3 hours when working with bsps->meshes, that’s somehow normal. But sometimes, upon restoring my work, I get dozens of errors that all of the things I’ve recently made and done cannot be found:
It didn’t even save the textures that I imported. It auto-saves every 10 minutes, which is a HUGE hassle too because it takes forever and breaks up my flow. But I do it anyway. However clearly it’s not even saving everything. Why have an auto-save feature that doesn’t save everything? The textures I imported into my content browser aren’t even in here. I have to reimport them, and I imported them dozens of saves ago!
I know I have to just rebuild it, which is the pain of any sort of development, but these errors happen far too frequently to overlook them anymore. I never lost this much work with Unity.
So please tell me, what’s the secret about Unreal saves? Why is this happening and how can I ensure this never happens again? I’m sorry for the frustration here, but this happens on a regular basis.
So I have “Save Content” checked in my settings, btw. Yet clearly that’s not happening.
Also: I have been Saving-All (ctrl-S) often. I would like an option for my auto-save to be a Save-All and not just a Save-Map. I don’t know if this would even fix this problem because I’ve been saving all the time.
Also: My backups are useless. They didn’t save any of the meshes or the textures or any of the bsp->mesh conversions. Why? Isn’t that part of my level?
Hi,
Sorry to hear you’re having issues; it shouldn’t be normal for you to be losing work like this.
Auto-saves are actually placed outside of your Content directory (see the Saved/Autosaves folder for your project), however - assuming you’re not running the editor under a debugger - you should be prompted to restore any assets from their associated auto-save when the editor is opened again, as the editor should know that it didn’t shut-down cleanly. I take it this dialog isn’t appearing for you?
I’ll also investigate the issues you’ve reported with saving manually.
Thanks.
Hi Jamie,
It did prompt me, and I checked them all to restore, but only some of them restored properly. That’s when I got the error message above.
The auto-saves didn’t save any of my bsp->mesh conversions, and not all of my imported materials. 
I’ve found out that there’s some subtlety the way UE4 handles newly added or imported assets. When adding or importing a new asset, UE4 doesn’t generate the associated .uasset file until you do something which causes dirty packages to be saved (pressing Ctrl+S in any asset or level editor should do this).
Unfortunately this can cause the auto-save restoration to silently fail for these newly added assets, as it assumes that a missing .uasset file has been explicitly deleted and shouldn’t be restored
Although I fear it may be too late for this particular case, all is not lost even when this happens. The editor will have still generated auto-saves for these assets (inside the Saved/Autosaves directory), but you’ll have to restore them by hand (simply move them into the correct place inside your Content directory, and then rename them appropriately).
Does this sound like what might have happened in this case?
I’m going to change the auto-save restoration so that it shows you these missing assets and offers you the chance to restore them - hopefully then no-one will have to go through this again.
Hi Jamie! I truly appreciate you checking into this issue. I believe this is exactly what happened. I have since been saving in every way and then fully closing out after major imports and re-opening so I can verify the imports have taken place. This seems to help as part of my regular workflow.
I would sincerely love to see the auto-save restoration updates–that would help soothe my worries immensely! Thank you very much for your time and concern with this issue, and I look forward to that code integration. 
These changes have now been made, and will be present in 4.3: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/commit/b76d033420188945fe9a3c8bd75c7d3bada2d786
Thanks for your bug report - this was a nasty usability/productivity issue that, thankfully, was also simple to fix.
Wow, that was really fast. I’m looking forward to 4.3 even more! Thanks again.
