That moment in San Diego when my Figma file crashed 10 minutes before a client presentation

I was sitting in a coffee shop near the convention center, tweaking a button color, and then the whole file just froze (I hadn't saved in 45 minutes). Lost about an hour of work because auto-save decided to take a nap. Has anyone else had a tool fail at the worst possible moment and found a way to recover faster?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_viola17d ago

Oh man that is the worst timing ever! I have to gently push back on the .figma.bak file thing though because Figma doesn't actually create those on your computer like a local app would. Figma is browser based so it saves everything to their cloud servers, not a hidden folder on your hard drive. What you probably found was a browser cache file or maybe a system restore point thing. The real trick for faster recovery is to keep the browser tab open and don't force quit anything, then try refreshing first because sometimes the file is still sitting in memory even if the screen went gray. Also check your version history in Figma right after a crash, it usually has auto-saves from every few minutes even if the file says it saved nothing.

rose_murray18d ago

Did you check if Figma had a local backup file somewhere? That exact same thing happened to me last month in a Starbucks, I was styling some icons for a landing page and poof, everything went gray. I swear auto-save in Figma is a liar, it said it saved but when I reopened nothing was there. What worked for me was digging through my computer's temp files, I found a .figma.bak file that had most of my work from like 10 minutes before the crash. Still lost some stuff but it beat starting from scratch.