If you’ve lost scene changes due to a unity crash, never let it happen again! Scene recovery in Unity3D is actually pretty easy in most cases, but it does require you to pause and think before you just re-open the project.

Follow these steps and you can save yourself from recreating hours of work from a forgotten save.

Check out this example

I’ve just saved my scene, it’s pretty simple as the Hierarchy shows.

I’ve been working a while, built an amazing scene, but somehow I forgot to save…

I hit Play…

And Crash!

Now because I forgot to save, I have two options:

Restart Unity Find the backup file and recover my work

DON’T RESTART UNITY!

Browse to the Temp folder of the project (my project folder is C:\Git\UnityTips\)

In there, you’ll see a folder named “__Backupscenes”

Here you’ll see a 0.backup file. This is actually the most recent version of your scene (saved right when you hit play).

Copy the 0.backup file into your assets folder and change the extension from .backup to .unity.

Then just double-click that 0.unity file and Unity will start with your recovered scene.

Special Thanks to @AdamTuliper for teaching me this one at the OC Unity Meetup!