My day started today by finding out that I had accidentally saved a crop of a website design yesterday. In the perfect storm of backup redundancies not working (including the most important one – my brain) I was left with one of two options: a) Spend a day rebuilding the file in an already tight timeline or b) finishing production from memory.
Turns out there’s an option 3.
Step 1) Open the affected PSD
Step 2) Increase Canvas Size
Turns out, this recovers around 90% of the data. While I’m unsure of why some of it was saved, and some of it was lost, I’m just thankful to have my file back. To best of my examination layers that I had drawn pixels in with the pencil tool, or “fill with background colour” were lost while smart objects and objects build with the rectangle / circle tool(s) were maintained. The biggest issue is that a lot of the masks were messed up, but nothing that an hour can’t fix. Maybe some adobe junkie and shed some light on this?