Forgot to save my layers and lost a whole afternoon of work

I was working on a portrait in Procreate at a coffee shop downtown and my iPad died. The auto-backup failed and I lost 4 hours of shading work. Has anyone figured out a good way to prevent this from happening again?

2 comments

2 Comments

miller.paul2d ago

Oh man, I feel this pain in my soul. The best thing I ever did was set Procreate to auto-save every 5 minutes in the settings. It's buried in there but it's a lifesaver. Also, get one of those little battery packs and keep it in your bag. They're cheap now and you won't believe how many times mine has saved my butt. And honestly, I've started duplicating my whole canvas file and dropping it into a folder on my iPad before I even get deep into shading. It takes like 10 seconds and then even if the app crashes or the battery dies, you've got a clean copy from right before you started. I learned this the hard way too.

anthony1652d ago

Did you try checking if Procreate saved a timelapse recording? That's not the same as layers but sometimes you can pull frames from it to recover some progress. @miller.paul's advice about duplicating the canvas file is solid, I do the same thing now after losing a full character illustration. Another thing that helped me was naming my layers with the date in the filename so I know exactly which copy is the newest. Also turning off the low power mode on your iPad stops it from killing background saves on you.