I wish someone had told me this earlier. I have taken two courses in ArcGIS Pro and watched several webinars about it, but no one mentioned how annotation actually works. I guess everyone was focusing on the new stuff that ArcGIS Pro can do.
So what I did not know was that when you create annotation, it opens an editing session on the annotation file in the Geodatabase which dose not get saved when you save the project. I probably would have figured this out sooner, but when you close an ArcGIS Pro project there is a pop-up asking if you wish to save edits. (I had always assumed this meant save edits to the map.) So when I closed a project normally, my annotation edits were being saved. However, I often leave a project open for three or four days while I work on it, and carefully placing annotation on a really complex map can take days. So if the project freezes up due to a glitch, and I have to use the task manager to kill the job, or there is a power failure, I would loos all my annotation edits, often days of work.
Since the loss of annotation was always associated with an unusual event, I had always assumed that I was loosing the annotation due to a glitch. I had no idea that there was a second save button hidden in the Edit bar that I needed to click on the save my annotation edits. Without knowing it, and despite frequently saving my project file, I was going days without saving my work.
There seems to be a major breakdown in communications here. I have contacted ESRI Support over the years on several occasions about my annotation work disappearing or resetting, but only on my most recent interaction with ESRI Support did I figure out that the Save button for the project does not save the annotation edits, and that I need to hit a different Save button to save my annotation changes. I have had ESRI Support staff tell me to “save my edits”, but I always assumed they meant save edits to the map, which I was doing regularly.
Has anyone else had this issue, or been confused by this, or is it just me? Is ESRI doing to poor job of communicating how Annotation works in ArcGIS Pro, or was I simply unlucky and somehow missed all the communications?
