Project Disappeared without Warning

Google AI Studio
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I’m trying to find out if a project I was working on can be recovered? It is nowhere to be found in my history or project lists. Without warning, it was gone. It was a text transcriber and name value pair parser and was showing promise, but now it’s all gone. If there’s no way to recover it, I will abandon Google and use a different product.

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Its unfortunate that you lost your project if that is what happened. Its a good habit to manualy save your projects , if you are creating somthing that you need to save, take matters into your own hands and save it any way you can. This includes copying and pasting the text to a file and emailing it to yourself. Even large frame works and full stacks with folder structures can be saved this way. With a python script you can save the folder structure map and all the files to a single monlothic script ensuring that you never lose your work. Its annoying for sure but in the worst case scenarios it just has to be done.

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Thanks for the dialog.

First, it was not evident to me at the time, but “Projects” are listed as a different category than “Apps”. I was able to locate the work under “Apps”. Even if I hadn’t, I would still not be inclined to “save it manually.” I’m experimenting with different tools right now and opting for Free version until the tech I’m experimenting with proves its fundamental value. One of the important factors is the ability to recall and recover work over periods of time. In this day and age I believe there’s an expectation to pick up where you left off with ease so copy/paste raw code is a red flag. I was able to periodically “save” the work in AI Studio and even download the work as a zip. The ability to upload a zip is not possible however devaluing the download capability. Additionally, the AI agent was unable to resolve my engineering goals after a few hours of trial and error. I moved over to Windsurf/Sonnet and the issues were reconciled in about 2 hours. To recap:

My mental model:

  • Apps = Projects and, IMO, they should all be listed in same bucket within the UI

  • Recall / Recover was/is cumbersome

  • Agent struggled to resolve issues in a timely manner

I’m not an engineer by trade so I accept my level of knowledge may be an important contributing factor.