Edits lost, despite saving project regularly

HamishRobertson

I have been doing detailed editing of river courses and saved periodically using Ctrl-S. I have only realized now that this did not save my edits (just the project) because the option to save edits was not checked by default (I have now checked it). When I exited, a number of save screens appeared and I only clicked the first one because I thought the others might be saving over the real data. Unfortunately, I have lost all of the day's edits. I find it difficult to believe that the default is to not save edits when Ctrl-S is pressed. I don't suppose there is a way of recovering my lost work? I am using version 3 (recently installed). Needless to say, I am a newby, learning through hard knocks. I have also now realized that I should not be saving to OneDrive.

wayfaringrob

Yes, saving edits is different than saving the project, which is what Ctrl+S does. It helps to think of a project file as a table on which you can get out a bunch of data, mess with it, and customize how it looks. When you save the project, you're saving these customizations - taking a picture of the table so the application knows how you had it set up next time you open it. If you make any edits to the underlying data, then yes, you need to use the appropriate save button. You're going beyond changing how the data looks for your project; you're changing the data itself and replacing the original that's on file with the library, per se. This data can be accessed elsewhere, not just within the project; you may use a project as a mechanism for changing it, but data is stored entirely independently from the project and needs to be saved separately as well.

Better cloud storage is in the roadmap for ArcGIS Pro: https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-pro-documents/arcgis-pro-roadmap-june-2022/ta-p/1187498