Corrupted .fla File, help

[Eatboxman]

Hi!
Was wondering if anyone would be willing to try to un-corrupt my fla file. I tried myself and kinda failed so I got desperate and made this topic.
If it can't be fixed then no worries, I'll just.... Drink a lot of energy drinks...
Here's the file: http://www.mediafire.com/file/5s4zln45dsblmo1/TheAnimeManAnimation.fla

It still has a lot of kilobytes so I figured I could somehow just be able to save the drawings so I don't have to redraw... a lot..
I don't really have any symbols or anything. Just the drawings.

I learned my lesson by the way.. Forever making multiple copies and backing up.. I know, I know..
Also no, I do not have a swf file I've been using Animate CC

Thanks for reading!

[kglad]

you may be able to salvage, at least, some part of your work by renaming the corrupt fla as a rar file and using winrar to 'repair' it.  then rename the repaired rar to a fla and try opening in animate cc.  i've never had that work for me, but it's worth a try.

but even if when that fails, you can usually unrar your renamed fla and salvage, at least, some of your work.  again, it's worth a try.

[Eatboxman]

Hey thanks for replying. I tried all the above with winRAR already (I renamed the file to .rar, tried extracting it, just got an error message) then I tried changing it to .rar and opening it up on winrar and doing the repair to zip and also repair to rar and both just came up with an error message or an empty file. I renamed it back to ,fla anyways to see if it could open but nope.

I was wonder if anyone else could try because it's odd that the file still has a lot of kilobytes left in it...
Or if there is some other method for recovering a corrupted file..

So I'm doomed right? Just say it now doctor, i'm prepared..

[kglad · Accepted solution]

you're doomed as far as i can see.  i couldn't fix that with winrar, ziptofix, yodot rar repair or remo repair rar.

the best you can do, is to prevent that from happening in the future.

to prevent that, each save should have a different name.  eg, if i have a project called farm_aid, i save as farm_aid_v000.fla, farm_aid_v001.fla, farm_aid_v002 etc.

i created a jsfl file, added it to my commands directory and created a shortcut, so after naming the first save as farm_aid.fla, the _vxyz is automatically appended when using my shortcut (ctrl-shift-s, in my case).   (if you're interested, i'll supply that jsfl file and walk you through the steps to use it.)

also, save often.  a typical project for me will have several hundred versions.  i periodically delete the oldest ones and only save the last 10 or 20 in case i need to return to an older version.

also, all my code is in class files and i've never had one get corrupted.  if i'm about to make a major change in a class file and i don't want to risk losing the older class file, i'll save it as ClassNameBU.as so i have a backup.

[Eatboxman]

Ah yes, I figured I was doomed. It's alright, I just bought 10 energy drinks and I'm just ganna grind the animation out and redraw everything. Thanks for trying to help I appreciate it! I lost about 25 detailed drawings so it isn't TOO bad it could be worse.

[kglad]

take steps to prevent it from ever happening again.  it's not unusual for a fla to get corrupted.

[HarrowwInk]

oh crap. now i have to reanimate it. that was my best animation and i need it back! it has lots of files and a character there. i don't want to remake it. so i can't do anything about it. i usually save in one file since it saves up space. if i do it lots of times, then that means i won't have space to do anything for my show again.

[HarrowwInk]

btw i can't do a thing with my swf. i have a crappy decompiler, and it doesn't bring back every asset, it brings back a few assets, but not all of them. so i'm doomed unless i buy a decompiler that can bring back it all. the swf has some of it lost. so i need some better advice.

[kglad]

if you have time you can wait to see if someone else offers to help.  otherwise, you can restart your work or hire me to work on it.

[Colin Holgate]

You could put the swf somewhere we can see it, then at least we can tell you what results come from other decompilers.

[emazcam]

can you walk me through the jsfl file and how to use it?

[kglad]

that's too cumbersome and time-consuming for a forum discussion.  google the info you need to get started.

[emazcam]

kk

[AngeloC]

thanks adobe coders this is a wonderful piece of software (if you want to quit animation)

[god221874889owp]

i just got this isue 4 time in same month whenever my light go this hapen to my fla file why adobe add save feature when we cant recover after small crash

[kglad]

open AutoRecoverFilenames.txt* and see if there was a saved file and, if so, check the folder location listed

*

win:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Adobe\<animate version>\en_US\Configuration

mac:

Users/<username>/Application Support/Adobe/<animate/flash version>/en_US/Configuration/

[guillermob98802400]

so, if anyone has the same problems as i did, years later, and couldn't do the rar thing:

My file didn't open.

it crashed the program, and it just stayed there, infinitely loading. 

I tried the rar approach, and it didn't work. It told me it couldn't open it. I was having issues because i was using WinZip instead of WinRar. It SHOULD open with winrar.

There i tried to repair it. Repairing it as "rar" didn't work, so i repaired it as zip.

That... also didn't work. The program still crashed. But it got me halfway there.

Apparently, my true problem was that i had a corrupt, or overly big, or something, drawing that casued Animate to crash while loading the scene. So i had to erase the layer, but i couldn't while outside the program.

Except you can!

If you go inside the .rar, you can see the file DOMDocument.xml

Here you can see all the guts of the .fla file. 

If you have notepad++, you can see this file quite cleanly.

There, i went to view>fold all. That will make the file easy to see.

Then, by clicking on the plus signs, i started opening everything. If you want to get to the layers specifically, you can do so by opening the first one, then "timelines", then "domtimeline", then "layers".

There you can see each layer, and if you open those, you can see the strokes and objects, etc. 

I limited myself to erasing the layers i needed (you have to select the whole code inside the layer's plus sign, alongside the <domlayer...> </domlayer> tags)

Then, the folders will probably cause problems.

The layers refer to the folders they are supposed to go inside of (the "parentLayerIndex" part of the <domlayer...> header). The number referst to the order of layers, and it starts the count from zero. I think it ignores the camera,if you have one. So you need to fix the numbers of those layers, too.

(Or add a blank folder at the start, like this "<DOMLayer name="blankfolder" color="#669900" locked="true" layerType="folder"/>" and then set all parentLayerIndex to equal "0"!)

After that, go to view>fold all and check if the code looks kind of alright, and if there is nothing out of place.

Then, save the file, add it back to the rar, change the .rar extension to .fla, and it might work!

It it shows no layers and a white bckground, you probably messed up deleting something. Maybe there is a tag that wasn't deleted, or maybe the layers are pointing to inexistent folders.

That was all to delete a layer. If you think this is what's causing you problems, try it! It's not that hard.

-----------

Another thing you can try, is to export the library of that file from a new file. If you have everything you animated inside an object, it might mean you didn't lose anything!