After Effects Project Recovery: How to Find After Effects Recovery Files

How to bring back the autosave project file that was deleted?

AEP project loss has a serious influence on your work. It can happen when Adobe After Effects gets crashes or users accidentally deleted files. Like the user above, the autosave AEP files were deleted after a period of time. There are several ways to recover unsaved or deleted AEP projects.

What is an AEP file?

Adobe After Effects is a professional video editing tool. An AEP file is a video project created by Adobe After Effects. It contains all layers and assets, including video footage, images, audio, effects, and timelines. You can edit them again when you open the AEP file.

Therefore, it’s important for users to save After Effects files as .AEP for video modification. The AEP file contains all editorial information, if it is corrupted or lost can be a very serious problem.

Does After Effects recover after a crash?

Adobe provides some built-in features to prevent data loss. If you have enabled the Auto-save function, it’s easy to recover AEP files when After Effects gets crashed. Unfortunately, this feature isn’t enabled by default, you need to turn on it manually. So if you haven't enabled it manually, you can't get after effects recovery files.

Besides, the saved version can only be kept for two hours unless you save it. If you have Auto-save enabled, you should have at least a dozen backups stored locally.

To enable the Autosave feature, you could follow the steps below. Go to “Edit” > “Preferences” > “Auto-Save”. You can see an option to save every XX minutes.

Where are After Effects recovery files?

Once you enabled the Auto-save feature, you can go to the default Autosave folder under the Auto-Save location. If you want to check whether the unsaved AEP files can be recovered via After Effects, you can reopen After Effects and a dialogue box will appear on your screen. Click “OK” to open the recovered version of the unsaved file. And then you can go to “File” > “Save As” to save the recovered file. Then you can view after effects recovery files.

Restore corrupted/deleted AEP files to a previous version

If you haven’t enabled the Auto-Save feature in Adobe but turn on Windows File History, you can restore files to a previous version when it gets corrupted or you want to get the last version.

You can try to recover your After Effect files via Windows File History. Currently, File History only supports Windows 8.1 and above. 

This method requires users to have enabled File History before. Type “File History” in the search bar and enable the File History. You need an external hard drive or network drive to save your backups.

To restore the AEP files to a previous version via File History, you can right-click the AEP file and select “Restore to the previous version” directly or follow the steps below to recover the deleted AEP file.

Step 1. Launch File History by opening “Control Panel” > “System and Security” > “Restore your files with File History”.

Step 2. All your backups will be displayed. You can select the AEP file you want to restore and then click the green Restore button to recover it to its original location.

How to recover deleted After Effects projects?

If you accidentally deleted an After Effect project, there are kinds of methods for recovering the AEP file. You can recover it easily from available backups, like File History. If you don’t have a backup of AEP files, the best way is to use a professional data recovery tool to get your accidentally deleted files back quickly.

To improve the chances of recovering the deleted After Effects project, you’d better not add many new files to the location where the After Effects files are saved before. Because the deleted After Effects would be easily overwritten if new files come. And then perform AEP file recovery as soon as possible.

It’s easy for everyone by using third-party software to get After Effects recovery files. MyRecover is a good choice with a high recovery success rate and an easy step-by-step wizard. It’s a handy recovery tool to help you recover lost data due to accidental deletion, hard drive formatting, system crash, etc. The storage device will have a quick and deep scan with MyRecover.

Step 1. Download and launch MyRecover on your computer.

Step 2. Hover the mouse over the drive saved deleted files before, and click Scan.

Step 3. This software will scan for all deleted and lost files on this drive or partition. You can use “Search for files and folders” or “Filter” to quickly locate your wanted files.

Step 4. Select the AEP files and click the “Recover XX files” button.

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