well in short, i lost a lot of my artwork from procreate in my wip folder. a lot of different pieces i was working on and trying to finish, and pieces i hadn't gotten to yet that i also wanted to finish, and lots more. 71 files exactly and i can't get them back.

my bf helped and did research and a support email has been sent to procreate staff but i don't have any way to retrieve them. the recovery tool hasn't worked and brought any of it back, and i didn't have icloud or any specific cloud storage set up with it or anything backed up.

yes i've heard that digital artists need to be careful and back things up but to be completely honest i've barely been able to afford cloud storage from apple anymore and not many options are cheap. i do have external storage but it's a whole process to back anything up (literally a physical process) and i haven't done that in a really long time with any art of mine.

i'll keep making art but i'm literally devastated that so many things that i was really proud of and motivated to complete and had put countless hours and energy and hard work into are gone. it's devastating as fuck.

i'm just so upset about it and i've lost a mountain of faith in procreate and storing things digitally. i've had this happen to me many times in the past in different ways, not procreate, but photos and even access to important social media accounts i'd had for years. it's an awful process to lose your own digital artwork of any kind, or to lose basically an archive of your daily life, when it's a social media account you care about and intend to keep.

it's awful but i'll keep making art. but i just need to figure out how i'll store everything and just hope, i guess, that this kind of loss doesn't happen again. i don't even know what happened with the app that made this happen. it didn't even crash, i closed the app myself and came back to missing files seconds later.